Sand in the Coffee, Vol. 79: the correct way to eat a royal red
Royal Reds are not red because somebody boiled them. Let’s kill that one in sentence one, because I watched a man at a fish counter last week ask whether they had “the uncooked kind,” and the woman behind the glass answered him with the patience of someone who gets that question eleven times a day in August.
They come out of the water that color. Deep water — 1,000 to 2,000 feet, way out past where the charter boats from Orange Beach and the Pass work the snapper grounds — in the cold dark where a shrimp apparently decides to be crimson, sweet, and a little bit lobster. They’re the one shrimp this coast can genuinely call its own, and right now is when you’ll see them everywhere. So let’s make sure you don’t waste them.
What you are actually buying
A Royal Red is softer and saltier than a regular Gulf white or brown shrimp. It has a texture closer to lobster tail than to the stuff in a shrimp cocktail, and the flavor runs sweet with a faint natural brine, because it lived its life in very salty, very cold water. This matters for one reason: you cannot cook them the way you cook other shrimp. The rules are different, and every disappointing Royal Red you’ve ever had was a regular-shrimp recipe applied to the wrong animal.
Also, they’ve almost always been frozen on the boat — which is a feature, not a confession. The boats that pull them are out for days; freezing at sea is what keeps them tasting like they do. “Fresh, never frozen” Royal Reds is a phrase you should hear the way a charter captain hears “no wind out there today.”
The correct way, in order
1. Buy them head-on if you can stand it, peeled-and-deveined if you can’t. Head-on is the local flex and they do taste better, but nobody’s taking your beach chair away for buying the easy version.
2. Thaw them slow. In the fridge, or in a bowl of cold water on the counter for twenty minutes. Not in the microwave, not under hot water. They are delicate; treat them like something that came from a mile down.
3. Cook them half as long as you think. This is the whole column, really. Regular shrimp go 3–4 minutes in a boil. Royal Reds go 90 seconds to 2 minutes, and that’s it — salty water at a hard boil, in, count slowly to ninety, out. Pull them while they still look slightly underdone; they’ll finish on the plate. One minute over and you’ve made pink rubber bands, and you’ll spend dinner wondering what everybody was so excited about.
4. Serve them with almost nothing. Melted butter with a squeeze of lemon. Maybe a little Old Bay in the boil water if you must. Cocktail sauce is fine for regular shrimp — on a Royal Red it’s like putting ketchup on the good steak. The shrimp is the event.
5. Eat them warm, with your hands, outside. I’m not being poetic. They’re best in the first ten minutes, peeled at a picnic table with the paper towels already out, ideally while the sky’s doing something. If you want to know what the sky’s about to do, the beach page has the radar and the flag — I check it before I start boiling, not after.
Where to get them
You’ve got two honest routes and one shortcut.
The counters. Orange Beach has seafood markets along the Canal Road / Highway 161 stretch, and the Florida side has them too along Perdido Key Drive and up in Pensacola. Walk in and ask the only question that matters at any fish counter on this coast: “What came in?” If Royal Reds are on the list, ask for them by the pound. A pound head-on feeds two people who like each other; two pounds if it’s a group or somebody’s from Ohio and going to fall in love.
The restaurants. Plenty of places on both sides of the state line will do a pound of peel-and-eat Royal Reds, and it’s a genuinely good order — the kitchens that run a lot of them know the 90-second rule cold. A plate of Reds and a Bushwacker on a deck over the water is a meal and an argument-ender. Check the happy hours; a few places run the shrimp as a special right when the price on everything else drops.
The shortcut. Most of the bigger grocery stores in Gulf Shores, Orange Beach, and Pensacola carry frozen Royal Reds in the seafood case. Less romantic, same animal. Thaw slow, cook short, and nobody at the table will ask where you got them.
The one thing locals do that you should copy
We don’t save them for a special occasion. That’s the visitor move — buy them Friday for the “big dinner,” overcook them in front of a crowd, decide they’re overrated. The local move is a Tuesday. Two people, a pound, a pot of water, a stick of butter, fifteen minutes, and the whole thing eaten on the porch before the mosquitoes clock in. No occasion. The occasion is that you’re here.
And if your rental has one of those enormous stockpots in the cabinet under the stove — the one you assumed was for a crab boil you’d never get around to — that’s the pot. Fill it a third of the way. It’ll be done before the water even thinks about boiling over.
— Chris
