There’s a lot to love about the convenience of cooking with shrimp. This oceanic protein is available year-round, nationwide. Its incredibly speedy cook time means you can rely on shrimp to get dinner on the table, stat. That includes an array of dishes like simple scampi, sautéed corn and prawns, lemony shrimp risotto, or spiced shrimp and rice. Oh, and did I mention that all of these dishes come together in about an hour or less?
But there’s a pesky little step you’ll find in plenty of shrimp recipes that you might not even notice until all your ingredients are ready to go—removing the dark “vein” that runs along the shrimp’s spine. While shrimp and prawns are two different animals, both have this vein and recipes often call for them both to be “deveined.” A contestant from the most recent season of Top Chef was eliminated all for not having the time to devein his prawn. Veteran judge of the show Tom Colicchio quipped, “I still can’t get past, like, not deveining your prawn.” But it made me wonder, is learning how to devein shrimp necessary? And if so, what’s the easiest way to get it done? Read on to get the answers as well as a few tips from the experts.
What does it actually mean to “devein” shrimp?
This is an important question, if not a tad misleading. Deveining shrimp refers to removing the dark-colored membrane you see along the outermost curvature of the shrimp. That said, you’re not actually removing a vein at all, rather the intestinal tract of the shrimp. Most people do this to avoid the ick factor of eating what their shrimp already has, if you catch my drift. But it raises the question: Is deveining shrimp actually necessary? Will omitting this step in my shrimp preparation harm the people I’m cooking for or make the finished dish taste bad?
Do you need to devein shrimp?
No! If you’re cooking your shrimp fully (to an internal temperature of 145°F, according to the FDA), you likely do not actually need to devein shrimp from a safety perspective. If you are planning on eating the shrimp raw, the advice gets a little more complicated. Because the shrimp’s intestine contains some bacteria, some experts say that eating it raw will expose you to the risk of foodborne illness. By removing the tract, you reduce your risk of exposure. If the recipe you’re cooking calls on you to steam, boil, roast, sear, or grill, the vein is not likely to pose a health risk.
Eric Ripert, the chef and cookbook author of the soon-to-be-released Seafood Simple, makes the point that the size of the shrimp determines how he handles the cleaning. “If the shrimp is very tiny, it is not necessary to devein them because there’s usually nothing visible to remove,” he tells me.
Andrea Nguyen, the author of, most recently, Ever-Green Vietnamese, resoundingly agrees, noting that the size of the shrimp has everything to do with her choices around shrimp preparation: “Sometimes with Vietnamese cooking we use those very small shrimp, like 51–60s, and we’ll use them with the shell on. I don’t devein those, because we’re eating those shell-on. It’s not a big deal to me tastewise.”
