PUERTO VALLARTA, Mexico — You’d need to attempt to miss the camarones embarazados on a stroll alongside the seashores of Banderas Bay. Makeshift grills encased in bricks or rocks, exhaling the final puffs of smoke from early-morning cooking classes, dot the shores. Soaked in a wealthy, burnished-red adobo sauce, head-on shrimp are threaded onto extra-long skewers, grilled till crisp and caught in sand mounds, tempting passers-by.
Ask locals and so they’ll inform you camarones embarazados have been a part of the tradition of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, “desde siempre” — since perpetually. Juan Manuel Gómez Encarnación, a famend native historian, recalled children promoting them on the seaside as early because the Forties.
Camarones embarazados interprets to pregnant shrimp in Spanish, however the crustaceans aren’t carrying any eggs. The title is a play on phrases: “En vara” means on a stick, and “asado” means roasted. Whenever you put all of it collectively, “en vara asado” sounds so much like “embarazado.” The dish, with its memorable, humorous title and its flavorful adobo, is making its solution to indoor eating.
The favored snack, typically trotted up and down the shoreline by distributors, has shaken off the sand and jumped from quick seaside chunk to must-order menu merchandise at resorts and eating places.
The fever for them has unfold past the bay, which touches the states of Jalisco and Nayarit. Variations could be discovered alongside Mexico’s Pacific coast and into the Yucatán Peninsula: You’ll discover some of their conventional head-on kind and others which can be headless and peeled. All are scrumptious, however variations with the pinnacle are an total richer expertise: The shell supplies crunch and packs taste because the adobo roasts round it.
There are as many takes on adobo as there are cooks, and all of us maintain our adobo recipes as near our hearts as one does a very good secret.
Most adobos are a concoction of a number of sorts of dried chiles and spices, together with a splash of vinegar. However it’s the addition of Mexican chocolate that makes sure camarones embarazados distributors promote out repeatedly, mentioned Oscar Rodriguez, a cook dinner and waiter in Nuevo Vallarta, in a tone that felt virtually like a whisper. Not solely does it give the adobo a deeper caramel colour and lip-smacking texture, but it surely balances the warmth and tang of the sauce as properly. Some cooks additionally use butter to assist the shrimp caramelize as they cook dinner — a more recent however welcome modification. (It’s laborious to argue in opposition to cooking any type of shrimp with butter.)
However the dish’s essence stays unpretentious: messy, off-the-coals shrimp which can be so good, you’ll want to eat the heads, shells, tails and every little thing in between.