The Best Shrimp Scampi

Here's what nobody tells you about shrimp scampi. The greatest shrimp scampi in the history of the dish — and there's been a LOT of scampi, the Italians have been doing this for centuries, the Greeks did a version before that, the Vikings had their own thing going, look it up. My scampi beats every one of them. Not even close. A slaughter at sea.

Other so-called chefs will tell you scampi is hard. They'll call it a 'restaurant dish.' A total disaster of an opinion. Scampi is fifteen minutes. FIFTEEN. If you can't get scampi on the table in fifteen minutes you should not be allowed near a stove, and I'm being kind, I'm KNOWN for being kind, my critics admit it.

An old Italian woman cornered me once at a market in Puglia — small woman, enormous presence, hands like a stonemason — and made me promise, ON MY HONOR, to never skimp on the garlic. Eight cloves minimum. NEVER fewer. 'You insult the shrimp,' she said, with a finger in my chest, and I have lived by that finger ever since. The other rule she gave me: do not cook the shrimp to death. Rubbery shrimp is a CRIME against the ocean. The ocean handed you those shrimp on a silver tray and you boiled them into pencil erasers. You owe the ocean an apology. The garlic, the butter, the wine, the lemon — they hold up their end. You only have to hold up yours. Plain and simple.

That's scampi. The real thing. Twenty-two minutes, one pan, zero nonsense. Serve it with a hunk of crusty bread to mop up the sauce, because the sauce is the BEST part, the sauce is liquid gold, the sauce is what separates a real cook from a sad imitator. Pour the rest of the wine into a glass. You earned it. The shrimp earned it. The garlic — eight cloves of it, EIGHT — earned it. That's the recipe.