Needs help fast.
I’m trying to learn how to cook. I’m currently in Houston so fresh seafood is available. Today, I went online and found a recipe to poach shrimp and cooked up 10 lbs. Detailing them was such a pain. I used my fingernails to peel the shells off and a knife to get the vein out. One at a time.
Tomorrow, I’m going to try crawfish. They look like they will be even more time consuming.
Is there a fast, easy way to do this?
Buy deveined shrimp, and peeled if necessary (which is almost never.) The backs will be split and the vein removed, and you can cook them with the shell on, which adds a lot of flavor.
If you’re super lazy, you can just not devein the shrimp. It’s not a big deal, a little gritty sometimes but that’s about it. I wouldn’t do this if you’re cooking to impress, of course, but if you just want delicious shrimpy goodness fast there’s no need to be too fussy. 
Lamar Mundane I live in the middle of a desert, so my usual method of cooking shrimp is to buy a frozen bag of cooked shrimp and run cold water over them until they are thawed. I’m a noob as far as fresh seafood is concerned. I didn’t know that I could get fresh shrimp with the backs split. Thank you for that.
Chipacabra my laziness has no bounds, but I get squicked out when I see the black line on shrimp.
Shrimp deveiner/cleaners are quick, easy, inexpensive and work very well. Many standard grocery stores and most specialty cooking stores carry them.
You can use a toothpick to pull the vein out of a shrimp. Think using a toothpick to pull out stitching. You do it right, you can tease the vein out of the middle of the shrimp and it doesn’t break. Much faster than trying to slice it open with a knife.
You just need to get better at it. Peel and devein a couple of hundred pounds of shrimp, and you’ll be able to do it in your sleep.
Some decades ago, I had what was very nearly a full-time job deveining shrimp for a restaurant in Mississippi. (Until I moved on.) Ever since, I have been delighted to pay the extra money in the grocery store to never have to do that again.
Starving Artist, I didn’t know that there were such things. D’oh :smack:
Of course they exist, people have been doing this since forever. You link just took me to Google, but knowing what they were called allowed me to find a pic. I dug around in the gadget drawers and found 2. Thank you so much.
Frank and TriPolar, you have my sympathy. Doing it one at a time for hours must be terrible.
Now, about the crayfish. Bill showed me how to break the head off and suck the meat out. They were very tasty, if messy. I like cold seafood, and think that crawfish would make a nice salad.
How do I detail them? The skins were very thin, will they get easier to peel when cold?
Yeah, I linked to the Google page so you could see at a glance the different styles and materials they come in. And you’re very welcome, I’m glad it helped. 
I was about to say that any grocery in Houston would have the red plastic shrimp deveiners for less than $5, but you already have a couple it appears.
I’m not sure about crawfish; I’ve always just eaten them boiled whole, Louisiana style, where you split the tail off, suck the head (if so inclined), and break open the tail with your fingers and eat it.
Detailing shrimp and crawfish?
Well, okay, if you want to. First you get a little tub of Turtle Wax…
And once again, you show why people love/hate you so much
This, pretty much. I buy whole shrimp 10 lbs at a time, and it is a giant PITA to peel and de-vein them all. I still do it, because I love shrimp soups (gumbo, my half-assed attempts at canh chua tom) and their shells and heads are essential to making shrimp stock. Cleaning them sucks. Yeah, it’s one at a time. All I can say is to get into a rhythm, start de-shelling right in front of the tail, work back towards the head side, and you can get the shell off in pretty much one motion. Invariably, I end up drawing blood on their fu**ing pointy shells. Every G_d-damned time… For dev-eining, I’m not a pro, and I settle with just pulling the vein out of the shrimp from the head side. I don’t get it all, but I’m not fussy. It’d be different if I was doing this for a restaurant. If you’re doing boiled shrimp, I like the recipe in Joy of Cooking, though it’s only for 2 pounds at a time. A bonus is that the boil-water is great for stock making afterwards. Leave the shells (though not the heads, YMMV) on for boiled shrimp. It really does make a difference in the flavor.
Where do you go for your seafood,flatlined? I’ve had great luck with the markets around Kemah, though I acknowledge that it’s a bit of a drive.
For crawfish, many markets in Houston sell crawfish tail meat. If that’s all you want, I’d honestly forego the effort of boiling and harvesting, and just use the pre-packaged stuff.
Thanks, but it’s not that bad. At my restaurant the smallest shrimp were about 25 to the pound, and came in 5 lb. frozen blocks. You could prep a bucket of thawed shrimp in less than 15 minutes. It was considered a break from cooking on the line.
I don’t like the tools, they tend to tear up the shrimp and leave you picking lots of shell off, but some of them work better than others, and I may never have encountered the best.
So here’s how to do it (as best as I can describe):
Take your shrimp and first peel all of them. Pinch the legs between thumb and forefinger and pull them off. Pull the rest of the shell off by grabbing it down by the tail and sliding it off the head end. If you’re removing the tail, pinch it and squeeze the rest of the shrimp out. Throw the peeled shrimp in a bowl and move to the next. If your cooking the shrimp with liguid, toss the shells in a pot with some water and Old Bay to make stock.
Next do the deveining. Take a sharp knife with a narrow blade and insert in to the curled up front of the shrimp, about 1/4 of the way down it’s length, with the blade facing where the head used to be. Insert it at an angle and push through so the point comes out the back about 2/3 of the way down. Pull the knife back towards the head pulling the vein out and splitting the top part of the shrimp. When it’s cooked, the split sides of the shrimp will curl up and make a nice looking butterfly.
Then get back on the line, orders are coming in.