Smoked Shrimp

Shrimp seasoned with paprika, garlic and cayenne and cooked in a barbecue smoker over indirect woodsmoke. The equipment named, pellet smokers, electric smokers, hickory, apple and mesquite chips, places this in American barbecue rather than any African tradition. That distinction is worth making because smoked seafood is genuinely important in African cooking, and this is not it. Smoked fish and dried prawn across West Africa are preserved over long, hard smoking that dries them out completely so they keep for months without refrigeration, and they are then used as a seasoning ingredient rather than eaten on their own. Smoked mackerel, stockfish, crayfish and dried prawn all work that way. What this recipe does is different: a short hot smoke of twenty to thirty minutes that cooks the shrimp while flavouring it, to be eaten immediately. The source is clear about the distinction between hot smoking, which cooks, and cold smoking at a much lower temperature, which preserves without cooking. This is the former. It sits in Worldwide Recipes under American, with its URL unchanged.