Grant Crilly is the Executive Director and cofounder of ChefSteps. Grant is a classically trained chef and, prior to ChefSteps, he worked on the award-winning cookbook series Modernist Cuisine and cooked at various restaurants, including L’Astrance in Paris, Busaba in Mumbai, and Mistral Kitchen in Seattle.

Grant Crilly

These shrimp burgers are snappy, crisp, nicely textured, and, unlike the shrimp patties you can buy at stores, they’re packed with shrimp flavor because all that’s in them is fresh shrimp and salt.The salt is super important. I don’t add the salt to season the patties completely (it seasons them a little); instead, the salt lightly cures the proteins, making them stickier and snappier, which helps with forming the ground shrimp mixture into patties and gives the burgers a really nice texture. It also helps to keep the cooked burgers juicy, as the salt improves the proteins’ water-holding capacity when they denature and coagulate as they cook.Getting your shrimp cold before you grind them up with salt in the food processor is also important. How cold? If they’re a little icy, that’s perfect. Colder shrimp will make it easier to pulse the shrimp into distinct, coarse shreds, and the fat in the meat won’t smear and melt, which will translate to denser, unappealing cooked burgers.Once you form the patties, you’ll want to let them sit in the fridge for a while to let them chill, which both helps maintain their shape and allows the salt to work on the proteins. I recommend letting them sit in the fridge for at least an hour and up to overnight; the texture will get snappier the longer they sit.You don’t want to cook the burgers all the way through on a ripping hot grill. I find that if you expose shrimp burgers too long to too-high heat, the outside can get leathery and unpleasant to eat. But if you use a <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/two-zone-grilling-guide">two-zone grill setup</a> (and you should!), you can get a nice golden sear on the exterior by setting them in the hot zone, then slide them over to the cool zone to rest and slowly come up to serving temperature.While the shrimp burgers finish, toast and refresh your buns, then load them up with spicy mayo, some shaved cabbage, some sliced onion, and then slide the burgers in. You’ll never make shrimp burgers on the grill any other way.

Perfect Grilled Shrimp Burgers