Dreaming of a Mexican beach vacation?
This vibrant aguachile from Colima will (almost!) take you there.
You might have to squint real hard to pretend your patio — or a picnic table at your city park — is in fact a beach in Mexico. But take a bite of this gorgeous, suave shrimp aguachile and it’s not hard to feel thousands of miles away.
In the last few years in the United States, aguachiles have eclipsed ceviches as the raw seafood treat grabbing attention; in Mexico, they’ve been popular much longer. Unlike ceviches, which involve a relatively long soak in lime juice for the raw seafood, aguachiles get just a very brief bath in serrano-spiked citrus (aguachile means water infused with chiles).
The dish was born in Mexico’s Sinaloa state, as an excellent story published last year in Eater explains. And though you find aguachiles in restaurants from Mexico City to Houston to New York City to Los Angeles using just about every type of seafood, including scallops, tuna, snapper and yellowtail, on Mexico’s west coast where they were born, they are all about shrimp. (Not from the start, though, as Michael Snyder’s Eater story explains.)
It was an aguachile that helped revive me after two and half months of confinement, when my husband, son and I ventured out to a restaurant in May, in Dallas, where we live. We dined on the patio at a modern Texas restaurant, Billy Can Can.
The dish was gorgeous and bright; I loved the way the dabs of avocado purée played with the lime and chile, and the shrimp had beautiful texture and flavor — unlike the rubbery, eraser-like creatures that over-soaked ceviche shrimp often become.
I asked Olivia Lopez, the restaurant’s chef de cuisine who created the dish, to tell me about it. She got a dreamy look in her eye as she started talking about making aguachile back home in Tecomán, her hometown in the state of Colima — which is about 700 miles south of the part of Sinaloa where aguachile was born. Her friend Nayely would make it, she told me, and they’d take it to the beach, where they’d enjoy it, with toastadas, along with coconut water or beers.
Colima is one of the most important lime-growing states in Mexico, she told me (the other is Michoacán), and on the road from their home in Tecomán to Playa El Real, “all you see are lime trees and palm trees. And a lot of lizards.”
Happily, Lopez shared her recipe with me; it’s very easy to do. And it’s so spectacularly delicious that we will be making it frequently — as frequently as we dream of a beach vacation in Mexico, which is to say constantly.
Aguachile, Colima-Style
If you like, serve the aguachile with tostadas, which you can buy in Latin-American supermarkets, or with tortilla chips.
Serves 4.
Ingredients
1 cup freshly squeezed lime juice (from about 7 to 8 juicy limes)
1 1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1 pound 16/20 shrimp, peeled, deveined and either butterflied (see instruction following the recipe) or sliced in half lengthwise
1 medium avocado, plus additional diced or sliced avocado for garnish
1 medium bunch cilantro, roughly chopped, about 3 ounces (including some of the stems)
2 serranos, seeded and roughly chopped
1 Persian cucumber or 1/3 hothouse cucumber, cut in half or quarters vertically, then sliced 1/4 inch thick
1/4 medium red onion, sliced thin
Tostadas (small fried corn tortilla rounds) or tortilla chips for serving, if desired
Instructions
1. In a medium bowl, combine the lime juice, salt and Worcestershire sauce. Add the shrimp, pushing them down so they’re entirely submerged in the liquid. Let them marinate in in the lime juice mixture for 10 minutes (no longer, or they’ll be too “cooked” by the acid).
2. Strain the juice mixture into the jar of a blender, setting the shrimp aside, covered, in the refrigerator. Add the flesh of the avocado to the jar, along with the cilantro and about half the chopped serrano. Taste and adjust the seasoning, adding serrano and salt to taste as necessary.
3. Add the sauce to the bowl containing the shrimp and toss well to combine. Transfer the aguachile to a serving dish and garnish with the reserved avocado, the cucumber and the red onion. Serve immediately, with tostadas or tortilla chips, if you like.
Originally published, in a slightly different form, at https://cookswithoutborders.com on June 13, 2020.
