How long do you steam shrimp?

A simple guide to cooking shrimp:

• small - medium sized shrimp will take 3 - 4 minutes

• large shrimp will take 5 - 8 minutes

• jumbo shrimp or large prawns will need 7 - 8 minutes cooking time

When the shrimp have turned pink in color they are cooked.

It might seem weird, but shrimp cook fast. Think about how fast something very small cooks. If you have a piece of meat the size of a thimble and you put it in boiling water it will cook in seconds. Now if you put a piece in the size of a footbal it would take much longer. It's the same principle how long it takes to cook a thick burger and a thin burger. Think how long it would take to cook meat the size of peas. It would cook as soon as it hit the water.

If you put s 25-30 count shrimp into boiling water the inside of the shrimp will become very hot in a few seconds. So you aren't cooking the meat like boiling muskrats. It only has to reach high temperature.

So experiment. Take a shrimp and dip it into a pot of boiling water and see if a small shrimp won't become very hot in a minute. For a large shrimp it might take 3 minutes. But the thing is having boiling water that when the shrimp are dumped in it doesn't lower the water temperature. If you dump five pounds of shrimp into one gallon of boiling water it will take 20 minutes to cook.