Dried shrimp: grades, dye and what to look for
Three piles at three prices, and a colour problem that is easy to spot once you know the test.
Udang kering is one of those ingredients that separates a dish tasting right from one tasting almost right. It is not interchangeable with fresh prawns, it is not the same thing as belacan, and the difference between good and bad is visible at the stall if you know what to look at.
Grades, and what each is for
Dried shrimp is sold by size, and at a wet market you will usually see three or four piles at different prices.
Large. Plump, clearly prawn-shaped, most expensive. For dishes where the shrimp is an ingredient in its own right and you want to find it: kerabu, sambal tumis with visible pieces, stir-fried greens.
Medium. The general-purpose grade and what most home cooking wants. Enough body to hold its shape, cheap enough to use freely.
Small and fine. Sometimes close to a coarse powder. These are for pounding into rempah and for kuih fillings, where the shrimp dissolves into the background. Buying large and pounding it is a waste of money.
The price gap between grades is substantial, and the most common mistake is buying the cheapest for a dish where the shrimp is meant to be a visible, chewy presence.
The colour problem
Good dried shrimp is a natural pinkish-orange, slightly uneven, with the shading you would expect from something that was once an animal. It is not uniformly bright.
A fair amount of what is on sale has been dyed, and the tell is exactly that uniformity: a flat, intense orange-red across every piece, the colour of a traffic cone rather than a prawn.
Two ways to check
- Rub a few firmly between your fingers, or on a white tissue. Dye comes off. Natural colour does not.
- Soak a small handful in warm water for a few minutes. The water should go pale and faintly cloudy. If it turns vivid orange-red, you have your answer.
Do this before you buy where you can. Most wet market sellers will not mind you handling the goods, and the ones who do mind are telling you something.
The smell test
It should smell sweet, briny and concentrated, like the sea intensified. That is the whole point of the ingredient.
What it should not smell of is ammonia. Any sharp, catch-in-the-throat note means it has gone off, and no amount of soaking or frying will fix it. The same goes for anything that smells dusty or of nothing at all, which usually means it is very old and will contribute nothing.
It should feel dry and slightly leathery, not damp. Damp dried shrimp is on its way to mould.
Soaking
Ten to fifteen minutes in warm water is enough for most grades. You want it pliable, not waterlogged. Over-soaking leaches out the flavour you paid for.
Keep the soaking water. For sambal, for a gravy, for anything going into a wok, that liquid is concentrated shrimp stock, and pouring it away is a small waste repeated in a great many kitchens. Strain it if there is grit.
For pounding into a rempah, soak briefly, drain properly and pat dry. Wet shrimp going into a paste that then has to be fried just means a longer wait for the water to cook off.
Toasting, and why it matters
A few minutes in a dry pan over medium heat transforms dried shrimp. The aroma turns from raw and slightly fishy to deeply savoury and toasted, and the texture firms up.
This is not an optional refinement for dishes where the shrimp does the heavy lifting, kam heong especially. Untoasted shrimp is the single most common reason a home kam heong tastes flat next to the one at the dai chow.
Watch it. It goes from toasted to burnt quickly, and burnt dried shrimp is bitter in a way that dominates everything else in the pan.
How it differs from belacan
Both are preserved shrimp. They are not substitutes.
Belacan is fermented, pounded into a block, and pungent. It brings a deep, funky savouriness and dissolves entirely into whatever it is cooked into. Dried shrimp is simply dried and salted. It keeps its shape, stays chewy, and its flavour is cleaner and sweeter.
A great many dishes use both, doing different jobs, which is the clearest evidence that one will not stand in for the other.
Storage
Freezer, in a sealed bag or box. This is not fussiness. Dried shrimp is oily enough to go rancid at room temperature in a warm kitchen, and it is one of the ingredients weevils find fastest.
It stays usable straight from frozen and needs no thawing before soaking. A bag keeps well for a year or more this way, against a couple of months in the cupboard.
If you have ever opened a packet that had been in the pantry since last year and found it smelling of old oil, that is what the freezer prevents.