What is Hunan Shrimp? A Fiery Chinese Dish That’ll Make Your Taste Buds Dance! ️

Is This Recipe Healthy?

The spicy shrimp and green bean stir-fry is often served with cooked rice to make it a wholesome meal. It provides you with an array of necessary nutrients: proteins, fiber, carbohydrates, and tons of micronutrients.

Besides getting necessary nutrients, our definition of healthy eating also requires limiting your intake of calories, sodium, and saturated fat. The dish has almost zero saturated fat, but, being often seasoned with plenty of salt and served without a designated amount, it can contain high levels of sodium and calories.

By going easy on the salt, we designed each serving of the shrimp to yield just 597.6 mg sodium. Compared to the 2300 limitation the USDA suggests on sodium intake, this is a good amount for a main dish.

We also designed each portion of the dish to give you just around 500 calories, 479 to be exact. As you’ll be eating it with two side dishes, such a figure is quite reasonable.

You can check our healthy eating guidelines for a clearer view of what you should look out for in your foods.

This dish welcomes shrimp of all sizes. Personally, we prefer larger ones as they are equal in size to the green beans and hence improve the aesthetic.

To save time peeling, deveining, and removing the heads, you can look for prepared shrimp in the frozen food section. They often come in jumbo and large sizes.

Green beans are the classic option, but similarly green, crunchy vegetables that hold their shape after cooking work too. We can think of snap peas, asparagus, and broccoli.

If green beans are your preferred choice, it’s good practice to cut off the pointy ends. They have a bad texture when cooked and don’t do anything for the final presentation, either.

The sauce that brings everything together is composed of:

• Garlic: the cuisine often puts tons of it into its dishes. Only garlic, no onions — their aroma is replaced with green onions, garnished at the end.
• Rice vinegar and honey: it’s the balance between the tanginess and sweetness that makes the sauce so addictive. Rice vinegar is substitutable with white vinegar only, as other vinegars’ aromas don’t match.
• Oyster sauce and soy sauce: the main seasoning sauces of Chinese cooking, adding umami, saltiness, and a beautiful dark color — a good salt replacement.
• Ketchup: it’s a simple ingredient to give your dish an appetizing red color, especially for spicy foods. It also adds some tanginess.
• Sriracha and paprika: they’re easier to find than chili bean paste and give a warm sensation instead of intense heat. You can use the paste or the original ingredients in the same amounts (or more) for the authentic heat.
• Cornstarch slurry: we wanted the flavorful sauce to cling onto the shrimp and green beans, so we used this ingredient. Making it with chicken broth gives more flavor, but you can use plain water instead — the difference should be subtle.

As with most Chinese dishes, the finishing touches include chopped green onions and some toasted sesame seeds.

How to Store and Reheat the Leftover

Keep this stir-fry in the fridge and try to consume it within 4 days. Or freeze it for up to 6 months, and label it, so you know when it expires.

Saucy dishes are difficult to remove from their container once frozen. We find using Ziplocs or biodegradable bags makes the task much easier.

Reheat the dish in a saucepan for 3-4 minutes if refrigerated and 7-8 if frozen.

Cooked rice can be stored in the fridge for up to 5 days and is best reheated by microwaving or steaming. Rice shouldn’t be frozen, as it loses its delicious fluffy texture when thawed.

We toned down the robust flavors with a hearty cabbage potato soup with juicy slices of carrot and white radish. Next, we served a glass of chilled, sweet-and-tangy green grape juice with the meal to round it off.

Hunan Shrimp