Shrimp and Corn Chowder from DamnDelicious Reviewed

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• Estimated Time To Cook According To Recipe: 40 Minutes
• Actual Cooking Time (Including Prep): 36 Minutes

So starting this month I'm going through a bunch of quick shrimp dinner recipes that I found online to see which ones were tasty, easy, and worth learning to cook. Of the three I did over the weekend, the Shrimp and Corn Chowder was certainly the most tasty. I didn't make it exactly as the recipe suggested since I didn't have all the necessary equipment, but it was still delicious and I'd make it again in a heartbeat.

It starts out with cooking some bacon! Yum. I probably used too much, and too fatty of pieces, but oh well.

You can see the bacon starting to cook here. I ended up with a lot of grease. You can see in the final photos that I probably used too much, but you can tailor the recipe to your tastes. We're going to use the grease to cook the onions. If you're using a non-stick pot, you can probably use less. I used a ceramic pot, so had to use more because the onions were starting to burn!

Remove the crispy bacon bits and save the grease in small cup to add as you need.

I tried to cook “healthy” but the onions were starting to burn in this pot so I had to add more bacon grease to keep things moving.

I also briefly cooked the shrimp in the same mixture. We're going to be boiling the shrimp in the final soup mixture as well, so you could probably skip this step if you want to save time. I shelled the shrimp before cooking because it's no fun to remove the shell of every shrimp as you chow down on your soup!

In the same pot as your onion, you can mix in the smoked paprika and pepper flakes. I was a bit gun-shy on the smoked paprika because I'm not a huge fan of “smoked” flavors. Or at least, they need to be very subtle to enjoy them.

However, the amount called for in the recipe was perfect. It wasn't too smokey, or too spicy. If you enjoy spicy foods (but aren't spice crazy) then I'd stick with the exact proportions mentioned in the original recipe.

When adding water, the recipe called for chicken stock (already mixed). I didn't feel like making the correct proportions and measuring everything out, so I just added some water and a piece of dry chicken bullion. It worked out perfectly! Depending on the size of soup you make, you can do this too, and just add salt/pepper to taste.

Here's everything starting to boil up. If you're going for a “quick” dinner, your chowder will not come out as thick, but you can eat this pretty much ASAP as soon as the bullion mixes into the pot evenly. I wanted to do it according to the recipe, so let things boil down for about 10 minutes.

Oops, forgot the corn. Definitely need that!

Another thing I realized too late is that I didn't have an immersion blender to blend up the corn into actual “chowder”. So instead I had spicy corn and shrimp soup, rather than a chowder. I just ordered my blender from Amazon (linked above), so will make this again and post pics of the newer version.

Still, the corn was pretty delicious non-blended.

The main time-suck for this recipe was letting everything boil down. You can skip this part if you don't have the time and eat it as soon as everything is hot, but taking a few extra minutes to let the flavors combine and condense does really make this dish taste better.

Final presentation with bacon bits and shrimp added! I added the shrimp to the boil for a few minutes at the end to let them soak up some flavor. I didn't want to boil them too long though, so they didn't get dry and chewy.

There's a bit of a later of great on top that you can see. I think blending would help prevent that, or you can just use less bacon grease. Honestly though, it tasted pretty awesome, so I'd probably do the same next time lol. You can get the original recipe here.