Homemade cocktail sauce/shrimp recipe

Could someone please share a great homemade cocktail sauce recipe, as well as any other favorite shrimp recipe.

Thanks,
Kevin

Kevin,

The bride and I buy horseradish root at the grocery store and grate it. We add enough Heinz Catsup to cover the horseradish, throw in a little Tabasco, stir and eat.

Needless to say, we like horseradish!

As Vernon posted that's about it really. I like to add some worcestershire sauce. You can make it as hot as you want with the amount of horseradish you use. I never use any hot sauce in mine. Some add a little sugar to the mix as well, and instead of ketchup you could use Heniz bottled chili sauce. HTH

Heinz Ketchup, horseradish (to taste), couple shakes of Worsty Sauce, and about 1 tblsp of fresh lemon juice.

Sounds like you got good advice on the cocktail sauce. Now to really make good shrimp cocktail you'll want to cook the shrimp yourself. The pre-cooked bagged ones have no flavor. Mix up a 50/50 mix of orange juice and water (optional, add lemon and/or lime juice for more complex flavor) add enough kosher salt to make it pretty salty, maybe 1 carton oj, same amount water and 1/2 cup salt. bout as strong as if you were making a brine. Throw in some peppercorns and some sprigs of fresh thyme. Bring to a boil and cook your shrimp. When they are just cooked (2-4 mins probably) strain off liquid and spread shrimp out on a sheet pan to cool. Don't run them under cold water to cool or you'll wash off alot of the flavor. enjoy, well worth the added work.

I am going to try Michael's cooking method!

I have about 50lbs of 16-20 count in my freezer that are screaming for cocktail sauce right now. Thanks to all and I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas.

Kevin

OK - so I am with the folks posting above in terms of the classic/basic style, meaning starting with ketchup and horseradish base with adders. For a long time I didn't mess with it AT ALL!

Over the last year I wanted to try something different and started playing around.

I came across a recipe from Rachel Rae (go ahead and snicker).

I made this for the third time with just a few minor tweaks as part of this years Christmas dinner with some chilled large shrimp.

I said nothing to anyone (except my wife) before hand to create a sort of blind test to see if I continued to get comments.

Everyone - EVERYONE walked up to me and asked how I made the cocktail sauce and told me it was the best they had. This crowd was made up of folks "long and short in the tooth". Meaning it wasn't your typical group of new age type folks. They like the classic stuff and change may not always go well.

So this, the Alton Brown coconut cake were the real experiments this year along with a goat/gorganzola cheese "ball/terrine" that surprisingly got active approval and comments even a day or two after the dinner.

Here's the actual recipe:

Fiery Shrimp Cocktail:

* 1/4 cup hot pepper sauce, eyeball it (recommended: Tabasco)
* 1/4 cup ketchup
* 1 lemon zested and 1/2 lemon juiced
* 2 ribs celery, from the heart, finely chopped
* 2 to 3 tablespoons chopped parsley leaves

Minor changes:

I only used 1 stalk of celery
Add 2 or 3T of horseradish (basically added it to taste)
Instead of Tabasco, I used Texas Pete
I added more ketchup than the recipe, basically adding more to taste to make it a little sweeter. I may have ended up with 1/2 cup. If you don't add horseradish, not need to change this from the original

All I might add now as an additional tweak would be a few shakes of WS.

This made a very nice dense and flavorful sauce with a nice spike with some crunch that clings to the shrimp very nicely.

Mince up the celery, parsley, and rind very fine!

This worked out pretty well.

2 parts homemade apple-smoked jalapeno/apple-cider-vinegar ketchup.
4 parts tomato ketchup
1 part grated horse from a jar
1 part honey