Copycat Bubba Gump Shrimp

Judith Hannemann — Sat, 14 May 2022 23:00:52 +0000

You don’t have to be a fan of the movie Forest Gump to love these copycat Bubba Gump shrimp.

Delicious Copycat Bubba Gump Shrimp

Haven’t seen Forest Gump in years but I remembered my husband and I enjoyed the film. I vaguely remember he owned a shrimp boat.

My memory was jogged when I saw this recipe on CD Kitchen and decided I had to make this. Mainly I love shrimp and coconut. Together, they’re outstanding. The shrimp are pretty sweet so a nice cocktail sauce or horseradish sauce is the perfect accompaniment for these shrimp. With most fried seafood, I prefer tartar sauce, but not with this. Cocktail sauce is it.

Deep Frying

These shrimp are deep fried. If you have an oil deep frying machine, that’s good but you are going to have to ditch the oil after making these. The coconut is the thing that makes the oil useless after frying. So I recommend doing these with about 1-inch/2.5-cm of oil in a regular skillet. Again, the oil should be discarded after cooking but it’s less wasteful than the gallon-or-so oil that fills a deep fryer.

Now the next question: no, you cannot air fry these. Anything batter dipped is an air frying disaster. Don’t even try it.

Batter

Where I generally make a batter with plain flour, this one uses baking mix–like Jiffy or Bisquik. The recipe stated “pancake mix” but then said, “Like Bisquik.” To me, pancake mix is the so-called complete stuff where you just add water. I don’t call Bisquik that, but maybe some do. Anyway, it’s what is used and I was surprised at the excellent results.

The liquid used is beer, just like you use for fish and chips (a famous food of my people) batter. The recipe didn’t state flat beer as most batters do. I used beer right out of the bottle and it worked just fine. The beer acts like yeast so let it stand about 15 minutes to rest.

The Recipe

Print Recipe Add to Recipe Box