Beer butter garlic shrimp, grilled veggies and a Saison to go with it – sooo good and perfect for the summer season.
Back in March 2019, Beerscene did a poll on Instagram, Facebook and on their website that asked you: When you think of April what style of beer comes to mind? There were votes for them all with a suggestion or two thrown in, but the majority voted for Saison.
This is quite appropriate given that this beer would have typically been brewed in March before farmers and farmhands got busy with crops. Typically it would have been expected to last through the summer and was meant to be a light and refreshing drink.
Saison is also a good beer to cook and drink with shrimp!
Sawdust City gifted us with a few of their Saisons to try. They were delish, but we especially liked The Princess Wears Girl Pants. We suggest you try them all.
We chose the There’s no way of Knowing for the recipe (because, frankly, we drank the other ones). You can get them through Sawdust City’s online store.
There is something about adding the beer that brings the flavour of the butter and garlic even more. There is a lot of leeway for the recipe in terms of how much beer and butter you use. The garlic, however, has to potential to dominate, which you may or may not like. To dial down the garlic, roasting them first will help mellow it out.
If you have a leftover butter-beer mix, you might use it for the vegetables, we opted not to. Nor did we use either salt or pepper and the taste of the beer butter garlic and shrimp was more than enough for us.
Ingredients
- 1-2 lbs uncooked Shrimp – deveined (we used frozen Pacific White which are easy to find)
- 2 cloves of garlic (optionally if you choose the roast the garlic first, you might use an entire head)
- 1/2 cup Saison beer (may choose more if you want to reduce further for a sweeter, less beer-y taste)
- 1/4 cup of butter
- Vegetables such as zucchini and peppers
- Chopped parsley (enough to sprinkle over shrimp when they are done)
- Olive oil to prevent butter from burning
- Oil to brush veggies with that withstands heat better – peanut oil is good for higher heats
- salt/pepper (optional)
Feeds one very greedy person. Haha, just kidding, depending on the size of the shrimp you get about 5 shrimp to a skewer, and probably about 10 skewers.
Directions
Thaw frozen shrimp in the fridge overnight, and soak wooden skewers. Alternatively, if you are short on time, you can thaw shrimp under cold running water, but wood skewers need at least a minimum of 30 minutes to soak or they will burn even in the short time you cook shrimp for. Alternatively, you can use metal skewers.
There are two ways to cook garlic. You can roast a head of garlic in the oven the way the Beeroness recommends in her beer garlic shrimp recipe. This allows for a subtler, mellow taste of garlic. This allows more of the beer flavour to come through, too.
We opted to mince and crush the garlic and cook it with the butter on a very low heat as we just love it that way. Takes less time and less energy.
Reduce the beer to 3 tablespoons by simmering on the stove. The longer you simmer and reduce the sweeter and less beer-y it gets so you may wish to add more beer and reduce if that appeals to you. The sweetness really goes well with the butter and makes this far better than butter and garlic alone.
When the beer is reduced enough, to your liking, add to the butter garlic mixture and brush both sides on shrimp before grilling.
We grilled these in our oven, by covering a baking pan with foil and putting the rack at the topmost level right under the heating elements. We used a metal cooling rack that you typically use to put hot trays of cookies on to cool on top of the baking sheet. Using the rack allows the heat to move around the veggies and shrimp.
Next, we preheated this cookie rack and pan under the grill to a nice hot temperature so we could get these nice charred marks on the veggies we like. Because let’s face it, we want our grill veggies to look grilled. It tastes better that way. If you have a bbq so much the better, but there is less consistency with the heat so watch for burning, so make sure the charcoals are well heated so the heat is even.
Zucchini typically takes about 7 minutes, peppers between 8 to 10 minutes. If you prefer, you can do these ahead of the shrimp and keep them warm on a grill set to the bottom of the oven while you do the shrimp. Or if using a bbq with a top shelf to keep it warm.
It’s a good idea to tightly group the shrimp on the skewer. This helps them stay juicy. We opted to keep each one curled on the skewers are aesthetics (because nice looking food just tastes better).
If you have had difficulty with cooking moist shrimp try this option – it almost guarantees moist shrimp :
Put only the first shrimp in a curl (skewer through the head and then the tail. Instead of curling the next shrimp in it’s own curl, curl the next shrimp around the curled one so that it’s stretched out and “spooning”. For each subsequent shrimp, tightly curl around the one before it creating almost a solid piece of meat.
The shrimp take about 3 minutes on the first side and 2 more minutes after flipping. Don’t overcook! You’ll know they are done when they are nice and pink.
Sprinkle the shrimp with parsley and serve with a Saison of your choice!
About the beer
Saison has its origins in french-speaking Belgium. While it was brewed while farmers had time and for summer drinking, historically it was also brewed in the cooler months as most beers were because of a lack of refrigeration.
Saisons can vary greatly from beer to beer, as they originally did from farm to farm. But typically they are pale, meant to be refreshing, low gravity and often have spicy notes that lean on the site of peppery.
Of the Sawdust City Saisons we tried, our favourite had the highest alcohol (The Princess Wears Girls Pants) but didn’t taste like it, so watch out.
