Camaron Rebosado, from the Phillipines

Camaron Rebosado a Filipino batter-fried shrimp dish, with Sweet and Sour Dipping Sauce

This recipe is for the January Recipe Challenge from Lin’s Recipes.  In short, Lin picks a monthly theme, and selects recipes for that theme; and first come, first serve to select what you’ll make that month.  (The idea is for you to choose something you’ve never made before, nor eaten in the past, which is a fantastic idea to stretch us out of cooking doldrums!)

Click on Rare Recipe Challenge #1 for recipes the others of us have created.

Rare Recipes Challenge #1

And our judge for this event is Jhuls of the Not So Creative Cook, which sounds like a misnomer to  me, because she is very creative.

Shrimp marinating with lemon, pepper, and salt

I’ve never made anything specifically Filipino before — and this sounded yummers, once I tracked down a couple on-line recipes for it.  In the spirit of this blog being gluten-free (which it has been for over three years), I did a preliminary test to ascertain that some gluten-free flour choices would work equally well as wheat, for the coating on the shrimp.  By all means use wheat flour instead, if that’s what you want!  For the post here, I went with tapioca starch because both with my preliminary kitchen experimentation, and with what I’ve checked on line, tapioca starch/flour has similar qualities to wheat when it comes to batter frying and doesn’t impart its own flavor.  Rice flour should work as well.

Batter in large bowl

I went with this recipe for camaron rebosado.  This blogger, Lalaine, presents what turned out to be a great recipe for this  I also read other variants of this recipe online, and from this decided to decrease the amount of salt she calls for in this recipe.  Well, as well as making this dish gluten-free.

Frying in about 3/4 inch of oil, simply because I don’t want to figure out how to dispose of excess oil… In this small skillet, 4-5 shrimp were fried at a time.

After cooking, the marinated, battered shrimp is dipped in either sweet and sour sauce, or in a banana ketchup — keep in mind that the original foodstuff that is ketchup did not have tomato in it.  Banana ketchup sounds fascinating, and not that hard to make — expect me to do so soon.  The other option is to buy it at an Asian market.

I’ve decided to make a sweet and sour sauce from scratch to go with the Camaron Rebosado.  (I’d have done the banana ketchup… but… we got no bananas today…). I posted the Asian Sweet and Sour sauce a few days ago — feel free to make this if you don’t wish to purchase it.  Sweet and Sour sauce has a good refrigerated lifespan.

Prep time:  15-20 minutes.
Cook time:  5 minutes per frying batch, at max
Rest time:  a couple minutes.
Serves:  4 for a pound of shrimp.  

Camaron Rebosado

• 3/4ths to 1 pound large shrimp, shelled (except for tail) and cleaned.
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 1/4 teaspoon ground pepper (black or white — I used black)
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup ice cold water (i put this in the freezer for about 20 minutes).
• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup flour (tapioca flour/starch or brown rice flour) – or if you don’t mind gluten, use all-purpose wheat flour
• 1/2 cup potato starch (or corn starch if you’d rather)
• High temperature co-oking oil – a volume to permit an inch/inch and a half layer in your cooking pan.  Choices could include:  Grapeseed, safflower, coconut, or peanut.
• dipping sauce, either sweet and sour (click the link for my gluten-free version you make yourself) or banana ketchup.

Marinate the shrimp in the lemon juice and half the salt and pepper for 10-15 minutes, in the fridge.  I moved the shrimp around in the marinate by hand, about halfway through.  Lemon tends to slide to the bottom.

Beat the egg with the water, in a medium sized bowl.

Mix in the flour and the starch and the rest of the salt using a whisk or fork,until blended

Heat up your cooking oil on medium high — before adding the food, test the heat of the oil by dropping in a small piece of bread — it should brown up within a minute.  If the oil is not hot enough, this recipe won’t work right!

Using your fingers or a pair of tongs, dip each shrimp individually into the batter, mix around, then place each shrimp into the hot oil.  Only add as many shrimp as make up one layer of shrimp — the idea is NOT to make one big puppy pile of connecting batter with the shrimp in between.  If you have to cook in batches, so be it!

The shrimp need about 2 minutes per side — using tongs, flip them over for another 2 minutes.  Pull them out by the tails (using tongs) and drain on paper towels.

Fry up as many more batches as you need, then plate.

These are great as an appetizer, served hot and with one (or two) of the dips — or as a main, served with the dips and with rice.

This recipe was easy and quick (it seriously took longer to clean up after!  All those batter dribbles across my range!), and very worthwhile if you find quality shrimp.  This recipe is best served fresh and not re-heated.

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I had leftover batter.  I reserved it in the fridge until the next morning, when  I added in piles of ground cinnamon and allspice, and fried up fritters in leftover oil.  I assume not traditional, but it kept me from wasting the batter.  With the tapioca/potato starch mixture, you do need to re-suspend the batter vigorously.

Batter fritters, about 3 inch diameter.

 

This recipe may also be found at Fiesta Friday and Real Food Friday.