Kitchen Secrets with Our Cuban Chef – Camarones al Ajillo

Camarones al ajillo is shrimp cooked in garlic and olive oil, finished with lime. That is the whole dish. No stock, no roux, nothing that needs an hour on the stove. What you are really cooking is the oil: the garlic goes in first and gives it everything, and the shrimp sit in it for about three minutes at the end.

The whole thing turns on timing. Shrimp cook fast and garlic burns fast, and those two facts pull against each other. Do it in the right order and you get sweet gold garlic and shrimp that still snap when you bite them. Do it in the wrong order and you get bitter oil and rubber. The order is the recipe.

This is the home version of the garlic shrimp we serve, scaled to one skillet on a home burner. Start to finish it takes about half an hour, and most of that is peeling.

How a Spanish tapa became a Cuban main course

The dish starts in Spain, where gambas al ajillo comes to the bar in a small earthenware cazuela, still bubbling, with garlic, olive oil, dried chilli and bread to mop it up. It is bar food: a few shrimp, a lot of oil, eaten standing.

Spanish families settled in Cuba in large numbers through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, and they brought their cooking with them. On the island the dish grew. It came off the bar and onto a dinner plate, next to white rice, with enough shrimp to feed somebody properly. Lime turned up, as it does in almost every Cuban kitchen, and cut through all that oil. The chilli stayed, but quietly – Cuban cooking carries garlic and cumin louder than heat.

Tampa inherited both sides of that story at once. When Ybor City filled with cigar workers from the 1880s on, Cubans and Spaniards lived on the same blocks and ate in the same places, and garlic shrimp belongs to both of them. The Gulf supplies the shrimp. That is about as close to a local dish as Cuban cooking gets in Florida.

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 lb (about 680 g) large raw shrimp, 21-25 count, shell-on
• 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 12 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
• 1 tsp fine salt, plus more to finish
• 1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper
• 1/2 tsp crushed red pepper flakes
• 1/4 tsp ground cumin
• 1 bay leaf
• 1/4 cup dry white wine or dry sherry
• Juice of 1 lime (about 2 tbsp), plus wedges to serve
• 3 tbsp flat-leaf parsley, chopped
• Cuban bread, or another crusty loaf, to serve

How to make camarones al ajillo

1. Peel the shrimp, leaving the tail shells on if you like the look, and pull the dark vein out of the back with the tip of a knife. Pat them very dry on paper towel, then toss with the salt, black pepper and cumin. Leave them in the fridge for 15 minutes while you slice the garlic.
2. Slice the garlic thin, about the thickness of a coin, on a board with a sharp knife. Do not use a press and do not mince it. Thin slices toast evenly and stay sweet; minced garlic has more surface, catches on the floor of the pan and turns bitter long before the shrimp are ready.
3. Put the olive oil, sliced garlic, red pepper flakes and bay leaf into a wide skillet while the pan is still cold, then set it over medium-low heat. Let it come up slowly, 4 to 5 minutes, until small bubbles gather around the garlic and the slices turn pale gold at the edges. Stop there. Pale gold is finished; brown is bitter.
4. Lift the garlic slices out with a slotted spoon onto a small plate, leaving the oil, the pepper flakes and the bay leaf in the pan. This is the step that saves the dish. Garlic that has already reached pale gold will go dark and bitter in the two minutes it takes to sear shrimp, so it waits on the plate and goes back in at the end.
5. Turn the heat to medium-high and lay the shrimp into the garlic oil in a single layer, not touching. If your pan is smaller than 12 inches, work in two batches – shrimp packed together release water and steam instead of searing. Leave them alone for 60 to 90 seconds.
6. Turn each shrimp with tongs, give it another 45 to 60 seconds, then move it to the plate with the garlic. Pull them while the thickest part still looks a shade underdone: the flesh opaque at the edges, the outside pink-orange, each shrimp relaxed into a loose C. A shrimp curled into a tight O has gone too far, and it will be chewy whatever you do next. Sear the second batch the same way.
7. Pour the wine into the empty pan and let it bubble hard for 30 to 45 seconds, scraping the base with a wooden spoon to lift anything stuck there back into the oil. The sharp smell of alcohol should burn off; what stays behind should smell sweet.
8. Return the shrimp, the garlic and any juices left on the plate, and toss for 15 to 20 seconds in the hot oil. Take the pan off the heat, add the lime juice and parsley, and swirl it steadily for 20 to 30 seconds until the oil and juice pull together into a loose sauce that clings to the shrimp. Taste the oil rather than the shrimp, and add salt until the oil tastes seasoned on its own.
9. Fish out the bay leaf and serve straight away in a warm shallow dish, with every drop of the oil poured over the top and bread and lime wedges on the table. The dish does not hold – shrimp keep cooking in hot oil, so it goes from the pan to the table.

Chef’s notes

• Start the garlic in cold oil. Garlic dropped into oil that is already hot goes from raw to burnt in about twenty seconds, and burnt garlic cannot be rescued – it takes the whole pan with it. Cold oil and low heat give you a few minutes of control instead of a few seconds.
• Dry shrimp, or nothing happens. Water on the surface drops the temperature of the oil and the shrimp poach instead of searing. Pat them dry. If they were frozen, thaw them overnight in the fridge or in a bowl under cold running water, never in the microwave.
• Pull them early. Shrimp carry on cooking off the burner, in the oil and on the plate. Take them out while the thickest part still looks a shade underdone; the wine and the last swirl in the pan finish them.
• Buy raw, not pre-cooked. Pre-cooked shrimp only reheat, and they tighten up in the pan. If the ones you can find are sitting in a lot of brine, rinse and dry them well and hold back on the salt until you taste the oil at the end.

What goes on the table with it

Plain white rice is the usual partner, and it is the right one. The oil is the best part of the dish, and rice carries it further than bread does. Spoon the shrimp over a mound of rice, then tip the pan and pour the rest of the garlic oil across the top. Tostones work too, though they take the oil differently – crisp edges, no soaking.

Whatever else you put out, put bread out. Somebody at the table will want to wipe the dish, and they should be able to. Keep the drinks cold and simple: a light beer, or limeade with plenty of ice. Nothing sweet and nothing complicated, because the plate is already loud with garlic and lime.

Or let us do the peeling

Making it at home is worth doing at least once, if only to learn what pale gold garlic smells like before it turns. On the nights you would rather not stand over a hot skillet, we cook it here as garlic shrimps, and you can order it for pickup with rice and plantains from the rest of the menu.