Food
Water Babies
Deepwater Gulf shrimp get all the press, but the sweetest, most succulent shrimp in Texas come from the bays.
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The shrimp industry in the Gulf of Mexico is the most valuable fishery in the U.S., with a higher dollar value than even the famous salmon fishery off the Pacific Northwest coast. In 1991 Texas shrimpers produced a record 96 million pounds of head-on shrimp, which had a dockside value of $197 million. Of the total Gulf harvest, 42 percent came from Texas shrimpers. Many shrimp caught in the bays, however, go unreported.
Despite its productivity, the Texas shrimp fleet—which is really two separate commercial entities, in the bays and in the Gulf¬—is growing smaller. The precise meaning of this is disputed. Depending on whom you talk to, the industry is either declining or leveling off to a sustainable number of boats. The fact is, the shrimp fleet, estimated at around two thousand to four thousand vessels—about 60 percent smaller bay boats and 40 percent larger Gulf boats—is probably half of what it was at its peak in the mid-eighties. The reason for the diminished fleet is competition from cheaper, imported shrimp and farm-raised shrimp. The catch itself has remained fairly steady in the past eight to ten years, but the price paid to shrimpers has dropped by about 75 cents a pound. Nowadays, a skilled shrimper is doing well to make $20,000 or $30,000 annually; Standley remembers that shrimping “was a pretty lucrative profession for a good fisherman in the fifties and early sixties.” Today Standley receives 50 cents to $2 a pound for his head-on shrimp, depending on size, and figures he needs to gross about $200 a day just to break even.
Upon a signal from Standley, Martinez hauls up the net after about an hour and a half of trawling and dumps the contents onto the white deck. The sea gulls scream and flock in close. Among the tiny eels, dogfish, croakers, catfish, and blue crabs, Standley reaps a harvest of six kinds of shrimp, the majority of them white shrimp, this being white shrimp season. In addition, there are brown shrimp, pinks, hoppers, sea bobs, and blood shrimp, also called broken-backs. All of the shrimp are marketable, the broken-backs in particular growing in importance to offshore shrimpers. They look almost transparent, the fluids of their bodies clearly visible through their glassy shells. Also crawling about the deck are caterpillarlike shrimp called sea lice, with hard yellow-tinted shells. Martinez throws them overboard. Another hard-shelled shrimp, the mild-tasting rock shrimp, is sometimes caught in the bays, more often offshore, and sometimes shows up in seafood markets.
Standley decides to call it quits around one o’clock because his net has been torn on a submerged buoy. At Hillman’s Seafood, he and Martinez unload two large plastic bushel baskets full of bay shrimp. The haul is 135 pounds, more than they expected. The shrimp are graded as 41-50 count per pound and immediately placed on ice in bins inside the shop. They will be sold as small to medium head-on shrimp to distributors, peddlers, and waiting customers. “Shrimp this fresh can be eaten raw,” says David Sager, the owner of Seafood Plus in Sugar Land, a high-class purveyor who ships Gulf Coast bay shrimp all the way to Tokyo to make sushi.
It is from humble fish houses like Hillman’s on bays and waterways from Corpus Christi north that the finest and sweetest bay shrimp can be purchased. Bay shrimp also can be bought directly from boats, of course. But if you can’t make your way to a boat or a fish house, the peddlers who sell shrimp from trucks beside highways and near shopping centers all over the state are surprisingly reliable sources for bay shrimp as well as Gulf shrimp. According to a study done by Texas A&M University in the eighties, most of the trucks sell a clean, fresh product. The main thing to look for is well-drained ice chests. The shrimp should not be sitting in water.
The key to buying shrimp anywhere is determining if they are fresh, which is not difficult since old shrimp smell pretty bad. The all-important odor should be clean and seaweedy, and the color should be a translucent grayish brown with no black or brown spots on the flesh. The shell should be firm and intact with no whiteness, and the head should be attached to the body. The head contains the shrimp’s digestive gland—the hepatopancreas—and is the first thing to decompose, giving the buyer an early warning signal that the shrimp is past its prime. A head-on shrimp will retain its flavor for about 48 hours. The reason that most shrimp are immediately deheaded is to retard spoilage and to cater to the domestic market, Americans being virtually the only people in the world who remove the head before cooking. Shrimp, like crawfish, should be boiled with the head on; it enhances the flavor and the resulting stock is excellent.
And how do you tell a bay shrimp from a Gulf shrimp? Basically bay shrimp are the smallest ones, though white bay shrimp can grow to a healthy medium or large size during the fall season. You also need to know when to buy. The fall season (when mostly white bay shrimp are caught) lasts from the beginning of August through December. The shorter spring season (when brown bay shrimp are caught) lasts from mid-May to mid-July. You can probably find bay shrimp for sale off-season because some seafood markets freeze a few to get through winter and spring. Just be aware of what you’re getting if you buy during that time.
Texas’ favorite seafood is shrimp. But we have become so accustomed to tasteless jumbo shrimp that we habitually drown them in ketchup or cocktail sauce. It’s time to stop doing that. Plan ahead and make a pilgrimage to the Gulf Coast this year, seek out a fish house or a bay boat, and see what fresh shrimp really taste like. There is sweet salvation in the bays.
Susan Chadwick is a writer who lives in Houston.
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