Baked Popcorn Shrimp

One of my oldest son’s favorite meals is popcorn shrimp, which I’m pretty sure he could eat every day if possible. I don’t make it too often because shrimp itself is so labor-intensive, plus I’m trying to cut down on the fried foods. Recently I went looking for shrimp recipes on the boards, and I found this one for Skinny Popcorn Shrimp from GimmeSomeOven. They have a really nice printable recipe on the site, so I won’t bother to repeat it here. But the photo on Pinterest looks like this:

So, I got started. I was serving 5 people, so I doubled the recipe, first peeling and deveining 2 pounds of shrimp. You definitely want to do this yourself instead of buying pre-peeled shrimp because of abuses in the shrimp industry.

GimmeSomeOven’s recipe calls for Panko crumbs, which I thought I had, but it turned out I didn’t, so I improvised, making my own cracker crumbs from two sleeves of Unsalted-Top Saltines.

Using a meat hammer and a plastic bag, the crackers were crushed into fine crumbs.

At this point, GimmeSomeOven calls for the shrimp to be individually coated with scrambled egg whites, but I just put them all in one bowl and turned them around until they were evenly coated. Ain’t nobody got time for that, especially if they’re peeling their own shrimp.

I did the same with the crumbs, even though, again, the recipe calls for them to be dipped individually. You can get them evenly coated this way, you just have to keep turning, which is a little messy on the hands, but it washes right off.

Then they went into the oven.

GimmeSomeOven’s recipe says to bake the shrimp for four minutes on each side. Oven times may vary. In my case, six minutes on each side was the right number of minutes, and the shrimp came out very tender.

And the dish was a big success. The kids loved the taste, and the adults loved that they weren’t greasy. These will probably go into our regular dinner rotation. Yum.