Beer Battered Shrimp Tacos
Can't fly to Baja? Bring a little piece of Baja into your kitchen with these beer battered shrimp tacos!
Servings 12 Small Tacos
Ingredients
Beer Battered Shrimp
- 24 large shrimp cleaned, peeled, I leave the tails on for easy dipping into batter
- 1 cup all purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon pepper
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon chipotle or arbol powder powder
- 2 tsps yellow mustard
- 8 oz cold beer
- 2-3 cups Oil for frying avocado or vegetable oil
Serrano Slaw
- 4 cups cabbage thinly sliced
- 1-2 serrano peppers finely minced or thinly sliced
- 1/2 small red onion thinly sliced
- 1/3 cup cilantro finely chopped
- 3 large radishes sliced small
- Juice of 1 large lime
- Salt and pepper, to taste
Crema
- 3/4 c Mayonnaise
- 3/4 c Mexican crema with salt
- 1/4 c Smoky salsa or chipotles in adobo finely minced
- salt and pepper, to taste
Instructions
Slaw
- Mix all of the ingredients listed for the slaw before you prepare the batter. Cover and keep chilled
Crema
- Mix ingredients. Taste the crema before adding salt. Cover and keep chilled until ready to serve.
Beer Battered Shrimp
- Pat the clean shrimp dry with paper towels. Lightly season with salt and pepper. keep chilled,
- In a small fryer or heavy pot, fill it 2/3 of the way with oil. Preheat to medium/high heat for 10 to 12 minutes. Oil temperature should be between 365 to 370 degrees.
- When the oil is just about to reach the correct temperature, prepare the batter. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, salt, pepper, and chile powder. Add the the egg and mustard. Gently whisk in 1 cup of extra cold beer first until there are no lumps. If it's too thick, slowly whisk in a little more beer. Very important that you only mix until there are no lumps. If you overmix or mix too hard, the batter, it may not get crunchy when fried.
- Holding onto the tail of shrimp, dip into batter, Gently shake off excess batter. Drop shrimp into batter until evenly coated. Fry for 5-6 minutes or until golden brown. Turn as needed. Transfer the shrimp to the metal rack lined with baking sheet.
- Serve shrimp on warmed corn tortillas that are topped with cabbage slaw and crema!
Notes
Remember extra cold beer and avoid overmixing batter for best results. If the batter is too thick, it may not get as crunchy and absorb oil. If the batter is too thin, it may not coat shrimp evenly. The reason the beer has to be cold is that you want a cold batter. When the cold batter hits that hot oil, that's where it will create that crunch factor! We don't want to overmix the batter because that will create more gluten and we don't want that!