When cooking with shrimp it's easy to view the shell as simply an impediment to accessing the sweet, briny flesh inside. The wide availability of peeled shrimp suggests many cooks avoid dealing with it altogether. But to overlook these crustaceans' exoskeletons is to take a pass on a considerable amount of flavor. Calling for shell-on shrimp allows us to pull a range of enticing flavor compounds into a dish—but we wanted to know the ideal length of time to cook shrimp shells for the best flavor and aroma. We designed an experiment for simmering shrimp shells to determine just that.
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