Shrimp Salad

If there’s one thing I want to cook and eat more, it’s shrimp. Even though I get very excited about ordering shrimp or prawn dishes at restaurants, I often forget to cook shrimp at home. 

But shrimp is one of the easiest and tastiest things to cook. You can easily tell when it’s done just by looking at the color. Once you see the shrimp turn a gorgeous pink-red, which only takes a few minutes, it’s ready. 

There are so many exciting ways to cook shrimp, but this saucy, tangy shrimp salad is the dish that will help me cook and eat shrimp more frequently. Plump, juicy shrimp are tossed with a flavorful, creamy sauce and packed with crunchy bites of refreshing cucumber and red onion. This shrimp salad reignited the joy of cooking and eating shrimp again for me, and I hope you get the same feeling with this dish.

Shrimp salad is typically made with shrimp, cucumber, red onion, lemon, fresh dill, mayonnaise, Dijon mustard, salt, and pepper. I add a few more ingredients to add more flavor, such as garlic, fresh chives, and Greek yogurt. 

You can only use mayonnaise, but I add a few tablespoons of Greek yogurt to make the dressing creamier and add a lovely tang to the sauce. Some recipes have celery instead of cucumber, but the mellow flavor of cucumber pairs better with poached shrimp. 

Both fresh and frozen shrimp work great in this recipe, but I prefer uncooked frozen shrimp that’s already deveined and peeled for the ease of making this dish. You can get fresh shell-on shrimp, but cleaning and deveining them will take more time and effort than poaching already peeled and deveined frozen shrimp. Avoid using frozen cooked shrimp in shrimp salad; it will end up tasting overcooked. 

Think of this as a delicious mayonnaise-based lobster salad — but with shrimp. You can serve shrimp salad over toast, on top of a bed of greens, or on a buttered roll for a quick and easy summer meal.