Veteran Fishmonger: Stop Buying Shrimp at Sam's Club (Get This $4 Bag Instead)

At Sam's Club, the cooked bag of shrimp costs a dollar a pound more than the same shrimp raw, and it's the one bag in that freezer you can't cook. Eighteen ninety-seven for two pounds cooked, sixteen ninety-seven raw. Same count, same tail on. I have sold fish in Seattle for forty years, the last twenty running my own counter on the water. So I walked the Member's Mark freezer the way I would walk a new hire through my case, and ran the arithmetic on every bag. Here is what that freezer hides: the word jumbo has no legal meaning, and Sam's jumbo, Walmart's colossal, and Aldi's jumbo are three different sizes. A cooked shrimp has already had its one trip through the heat, so a hot pan cooks it a second time and turns it to rubber. And the cheapest sticker in the case, the easy-peel bag at five ninety-nine a pound, comes out about the same price per pound of meat as the peeled bag once you weigh the shell. What I buy instead: the small raw bag from a regular grocery store, about five dollars where I shop, with the count on the front and a short ingredient line on the back. Read the ingredient line, read the country line, and use the whole bag the night you open it. Then salt, a quarter teaspoon of baking soda, fifteen minutes, a hot pan, and off the heat the second they curl into a C. Also in this one: how to read shrimp counts across stores, the shell math on easy-peel shrimp, why a twelve-ounce bag beats a three-pound bag for freezer burn, the FDA's 1991 letter on ice glaze, the January FDA shrimp turn-backs for banned veterinary drugs, the one bag in that Sam's freezer I would put in my own cart, Argentine red shrimp and why it cooks fast, the per-plate cost of each bag, the one night the cooked bag is worth buying, and how to warm cooked shrimp without wrecking it. New video every day. Subscribe to Gus Lindqvist Fish. #fishmonger #shrimp #samsclub #seafoodtips #frozenshrimp #savemoney