I’ve accumulated far too much frozen scampi in my freezer, so I need to eat it up. Can Dopers suggest lower-fat sauces that will complement the scampi? I typically serve it with boiled potatoes.
Sauces like Bearnaise and Hollandaise are nice but dreadfully fattening. Likewise Mayonnaise and Tartare. Ketchup is totally overpowering taste-wise.
I don’t know what goes well with scampi, but how do you feel about hot pepper sauce? That’s fat free. If you’re from the land of haggis, is that even an option? Mustard is fat free, but is that a good thing for scampi?
What is breaded scampi anyway? I assume some sort of crustacean like shrimp.
Anyway, I’d think cocktail sauce is probably the most obvious relatively low-ish calorie sauce with a lot of flavor. Not much in the way of chiles, but some horseradish.
In the UK I think it’s specifically Dublin Bay prawns, which are also known as langoustines, IIRC. It’s basically like shrimp.
Here in the US, one of the traditional sauces is cocktail sauce, basically ketchup or chili sauce doctored up with horseradish and perhaps a little lemon, Tabasco, and/or Worcestershire. I personally go for a vinegary hot sauce with breaded seafood, but that appears to be out. Even just a simple squirt of lemon would do.
If ketchup is overpowering as a base (I would just say use less of it), then you can do something like a simple tomato sauce with garlic and whatnot to keep the calories down. Shrimp and marinara sauce go fine together.
Scampi, to me, implies shrimp in a sauce of butter and garlic, sometimes with cream added. ‘Scampi’ specifically refers to a certain species of crustacean, but since we have ‘shrimp scampi’ and ‘chicken scampi’, I interpret the word as meaning the style of preparation. As I recall, Quartz is in the UK, so he might actually have a bag of Nephrops norvegicus in his freezer.
In my mind, ‘breaded scampi’ is just breaded shrimp. In the U.S., breaded shrimp is usually eaten with cocktail sauce, which you can whip up with catsup and horseradish. Some people like breaded shrimp with tartar sauce, but I like them with cocktail sauce.
Of course you can always make a shrimp po’boy. Remove the tail shell and fry the rest in oil (or bake, if you want to cut down on the fat a little). Slice a baguette lengthwise and toast it a little. Put on the hot shrimp and dress with lettuce, tomatoes, and mayonnaise, with Louisiana-style (Tabasco, Louisiana, Trappey’s, etc.) hot sauce as desired. (Louisiana-style hot sauce is just red peppers, vinegar, and salt.) Incidentally, breaded-and-fried oysters make an excellent po’boy, or you can do a combination of shrimp and oysters.
Holy crap! I didn’t know chicken scampi was a thing, but it appears to be so. I’ve only known it in the phrase “shrimp scampi” in th US, referring to the method of prep you describe. Outside the US, it seems to be used on its own to describe shrimp or shrimp-like crustaceans, not as a method of preparation.
Here’s the NYTimes explanation. Apparently, Italian cooks came over and in recreating a butter, garlic, and wine dish made with scampi (the crustacean) in the US, they substituted shrimp, but kept both names, ergo, shrimp scampi.
Color me enlightened… I always had assumed that the “scampi” was the method of preparation in Garlic, Butter, and Wine. I was also confused, because the shrimp we would use over here for scampi would never be breaded.
So, for us in the US, it appears that the OP has a bunch of frozen breaded shrimp/prawns/langoustines. As others have mentioned, cocktail sauce is the go to here, but even just a squeeze of lemon juice would work if that isn’t to your taste.
Yeah, in Robert Wolke’s book “What Einstein Told His Cook 2”, he relates a tale of how he and his daughter made an eggplant dish with garlic and butter, and named it in the same spirit of the US dish “Shrimp scampi”, as “Eggplant Aubergine”.
Biscuits are basically flour, fat, milk, and salt (with some baking powder). Gravy is basically flour, fat, milk, and salt. Pretty much the same thing. Perhaps I should call the dish ‘biscuits and liquid biscuits’.
Huh? Flour is an optional thickener for gravy; but milk and salt are non-existent. To thicken it up, I might put in cream or crème fraiche but never milk.
The gravy for biscuits and gravy in the U.S. is made by rendering fat from bacon and/or sausage, making a roux with flour, adding milk as the main ingredient, and seasoning with salt and pepper and (‘optionally’) cayenne pepper. Chefguy has a better recipe, but that’s the basis.