How Ina Garten Puts A Twist On Classic Shrimp Cocktail

Shrimp cocktail has got to be one of my all-time favorite party foods. There's just something about the simple combination of shrimp with tangy tomato and horseradish sauce that's just perfect to me. Most of the time, the shrimp comes pre-cooked, frozen, then thawed (which is perfectly fine, provided you store it safely), which usually makes them less of the star of the dish than the bright cocktail sauce.

Ina Garten makes the shellfish the leading player in her shrimp cocktail by cooking hers from scratch. And while most people gently poach their shrimp if they're preparing them from raw, Garten takes a much different approach. Instead of cooking her shrimp in water, she opts to roast them in the oven instead, which adds an additional layer of flavor that you don't get from the usual shrimp cocktail. But there's another detail that comes as a result of this cooking method — it can transform the usually ice-cold dish into a warm appetizer.

You can get the recipe for Garten's shrimp cocktail on her website, and it couldn't be easier. Roasting the shrimp adds some color to it, giving you Maillard, browned flavors that poaching just doesn't provide. It's hands-off, too, which means you can spend that free time stirring together the homemade cocktail sauce. But there's also a side-effect. If you serve your shrimp just after you cook it, it'll still be hot from the oven. Since we're so used to eating chilled poached shrimp for shrimp cocktail, it's hard to imagine enjoying it any other way. But eating it warm takes what's old and makes it a little bit new again.

Since shrimp cocktail really is just a simple two-part dish of shrimp and sauce, the small details of preparing each component do matter. It's one of those dishes you pay a premium for at a steakhouse, but is also something you can easily recreate at home for a fraction of the price. Although it might seem intimidating, it's easy to make fancy shrimp cocktail at home. And if you're looking to really impress your dining guests, we've got a few tricks up our sleeves to change the way you serve shrimp cocktail too.