I’m pretty sure that I read somewhere that the term en brochette refers to food that is cooked and/or served on “brochettes” or skewers.

**** Wait a minute… Googling now ****

Yup that’s what it is. Gotta love the interweb.

I haven’t got a large French vocabulary. As a matter of fact, it mostly consists of coq a vin, oui, and the lyrics to Labelle’s “Lady Marmalade". Well, maybe a few more. Nevertheless, these are tasty terms, shrimp en brochette. For sure!

This dish is another in my arsenal that came about from a restaurant dish that I could not get enough of, Pappadeaux’s shrimp en brochette. I think Pappasitos may make it as well, I am not sure. In any case, I asked the waiter how the dish was made and of course, he danced around the request a bit eventually giving me a vague explanation. It seemed easy enough to me though. Bacon wrapped shrimp with a slice of jalapeno inside. I really needed to know the method of cooking. Were they grilled? Deep fried? Broiled?

So, the first time I made this, I wrapped the shrimp and jalapeno with bacon, a whole slice, and broiled them. Difficult to keep track of, twelve shrimp just floating about freely on a broiler pan. The bacon never crisped. Well, it actually did, but only after I had made rawhide canine gnawing toys out of the shrimp. You know shrimp only take a few minutes to cook. Bacon, a wee bit longer. I remember eating these and thinking, how much friggin bacon is this!!!!

I have since made this a few times more. I haven’t perfected it, but I now know that I can manage the shrimp better when they are en brochette, I can cut the bacon strips in half before wrapping the shrimp, and I can pre-cook the bacon so that it crisps up before I make jerky out of the shrimp. The end result has been worth my continued effort. I team this up with a basic recipe for a Creole dirty rice.

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Ingredients:

For the dirty rice:
2 cups chicken stock
1 cup white rice
1 medium onion chopped
1 celery rib chopped
1 red or green bell pepper
1/4 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper (I use more though)
5 chicken livers (ground in a food processor or blender)
1/4 pound ground chicken (you can use gizzards here, but none were readily avaiable to me at the time)
3 cloves garlic minced
olive oil
salt and pepper

For the shrimp:
12 large shrimp peeled with tail on, deveined, and butterflied
12 slices of good bacon
12 pieces of pepper jack cheese ~1/2 inch thick (I usually use jalapenos along with the cheese but not this time)
2 wooden skewers that have soaked for at least an hour.

Method:

Prep the rice ingredients

Heat a sauce pan over medium high heat, add olive oil, about 2-3 tablespoons, then add in the trinity (the onion, pepper, and celery)

Let that cook saute for about 4 minutes, then add garlic, and the ground chicken.

Cook the chicken til brown and crumbly.

Add the livers, these will cook up quickly, so keep stirring.

When the livers have browned, stir in the rice and stock.

Bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat to simmer, and simmer for 25 minutes.

Prep the good stuff…

For the bacon, since we have to par-cook it. I mike it. I have a cool way to keep the bacon from shrinking while in the mike. Place the bacon on a plate then cover with paper towels and then cover with another plate and something to hold that plate down. This keeps the strps elongated.

Microwave the bacon for about 1 minute 25 seconds. Now all microwaves are different, so times can vary. The bacon should just be cooked. And not shrinkage!



Let the bacon cool. Imbibe at this time.



After the bacon has cooled, halve each slice and prep the skrimps. Take a bacon slice, lay it flat. Place a shimp on the end. Place a piece of cheese in the butterflied area.



Wrap the bacon around the shrimp and cheese.



Skewer the shrimp. Repeat this process for all shrimp, 12 to a skewer.



Pre-heat the broiler. Lube up a broiler pan and place the shrimp on it.

Broil 6 inches from heat source for 4 minutes then flip. Broil for another 3 minutes and remove.

Imbibe.

Serve with the dirty rice. Don’t worry about the cheese melting, it leaves plenty of flavor and the bacon adds blenty of flavor as well.