I think once they are cooked it would be very difficult, if not impossible, unless they are very large? Shrimp poo, cooked shrimp poo is just other sea creatures they've digested. I wouldn't think twice about just eating them!

edited: I thought about this more and realized that in the summer I go to a friend's cabin on Hood Canal here in WA (saltwater) and during shrimping season we put out pots, pull them in hours later, dump the shrimp in boiling water, then into the sink to rinse with cold water, then eat them without a thought to deveining them. They are not huge, tho. A very sought after PNW delicacy.

I always buy raw prawns and devein them before cooking them. I can’t stand the thought of eating the poop chute. Once the prawns are cooked, the poop chute becomes very friable and removing them is a mission and will require water to rinse the stuff out.

Only because of my husband. I grew up on the Gulf coast and my grandmother never deveined shrimp.

What about oysters and clams? Don't they have " Poop Chutes"?

dcarch

I think oysters and clams are normally purged. At least, I purge clams. Shrimp, I typically cut the backs and devein. I’m not totally anal (😂) about it but do try to get the thickest, fullest portion out at least. There’s also this option, again not always perfect:

Let's face the truth, all oceans, rivers, ponds, lakes where marine life occupy, are all cemeteries, and toilets for seafoods.

The only time I really keep everything clean is when I make sushi.

dcarch

Given the opportunity, I eat the entire shrimp - head, legs, tail, exoskeleton, poop chute, everything. Especially if its been deep fried and crunchy, yummm.

Yikes! Hard pass for me. That all goes into my compost bucket.

I usually buy the EZ-peel shrimp that is already de-poop chuted.

“…de-poop chuted.”

LOL, LJ…de-poop chuted for me, too!👍🏻

The price for cleaned and cooked usually seems so much better to me than getting my hands all cold prepping them, but I do "devein" them when they're in their original form. It's the way I learned how. I agree with DCarch about the composition of the ocean, along with forever chemicals, harmful hormones, etc., but I'm not making babies, and I've never heard of anyone getting sick from shrimp poop., so risk the ocean, etc. OTOH, releasing the tension of the shrimp..."skin?"...makes the shrimp cook up fluffier and in general releases more shrimpy flavor, so there's an added bonus to cleaning them...

In my experience oysters are purged just as clams are. That is to say, sometime they are and sometimes they aren’t. But yes, I like to purge because I do not like to risk chewing on sand. Has nothing to do with fear of poop or their intestinal tract.

The best; had it in a Chinese restaurant, we ordered live shrimps from the tank, 1/4 lb, 1/2 lb or a full lb. The waiter brought a butane stove and a pot of boiling water, a small dish of soy sauce, we cooked the jumping shrimps ourselves and, Wow!.

Some of you i am sure have had Fruit De Mer in France. No one there have heard of poop chute.

dcarch

Foas we harvest oysters and clams straight from the beach and have never seen an oyster purged, only clams. Except for a little pearl once in a while have never had a gritty oyster! Tho our oysters are young and small and usually eaten in a single bite ir swallowed whole when raw

Oh no - I also can't stand the sand - ick! In fact, I call it the sand vein. Shrimp I get from restaurants is always split down the back, so if anything was missed, it's easy to remove with the point of a knife. When I buy shrimp raw, I always clean it very well.

And I used to purge the quahog clams from our bay for several days using cornmeal - made them very tasty 😋

Dcarch, we certainly HAVE heard of poop chutes LOL

It depends. I'm not at all logical about this.

What we call prawns - I think shrimp for you, I de-vein.

Langoustines, I boil on in the shell, but I do check the peeled beast for a poop chute. It's easy to remove from a cooked langoustine.

I'm keen to try the deveining method with a pin!!!

Since clams live buried in the ocean floor purging them would seem more useful. Oysters and mussels grow in free water attached to a rock or artificial substrate so they're likely to be fair less sandy. I've never purged either, nor deveined a prawn.

Good point about where oysters live; I’m willing to accept that my efforts have been unnecessary. Not something I eat much of anyway. I’ve never thought to purge mussels, can’t say why, and I don’t recall having had any issues. I’ve been served many a sandy clam though, especially steamers, and will continue to purge those. Come to think of it, I believe I’ve noticed it more with cooked clams, as they get chewed more than raw. Anyway the minimal effort to purge is well worth it to avoid a gritty meal, IMO.

Interesting how many here don’t devein shrimp. I’ve seen many recipes (esp Julia Child, IIRC) say devein ”if desired” and often thought, ”Who wouldn’t desire?”

I have a friend who owns a commercial mussel farm, so I know a fair amount about them. They grow on lines suspended in the water and don't muck around in the sand. They don't need purging, just debearding. In the wild they attach to something, but not in the sand. It took me a while to get up the nerve to eat her mussels, just because we used to smash them on pilings when I was a kid and watch the guts ooze out. I never considered them food. I feel bad about doing that now. I am lucky to be able to get bags of fresh mussels whenever I want (free, too)!

We always dig steamers at least a day ahead and purge overnight or two. Some people put cornmeal in the water, but my friends have never done that and deem it unnecessary. They are never gritty. We change the sea water in the buckets once or twice.

Free mussels. My dream. Suspending in water is one method of growing but I buy tidal mussels. They're grown on sort of tripod affairs and are not permanently under water. So they could contain a little sand. But they're easily rinsed. No need to purge.

I once decided that I would raise my own escargot. I caught snails from my garden, raised them on lettuce, and purged them with cornmeal. SWMBO found out and raised holy hell. The snails were released back into the wild.

jyl I love when your wife puts her foot down; it’s always a good story!

@Olychick is correct all of us having grown up in NOLA you wouldn’t sit at a table piled high with fresh boiled shrimp and tiny red potatoes and devein each shrimp!! lol.. you’d be pretty hungry as they’d all be gone before you cleaned the first one.

Nowadays you couldn’t afford any table full of fresh caught . And there aren’t anywhere near the shrimpers left out there workin’ the Gulf.

As for oysters … well when you have seen tiny pools of crude oil in the half shell as it is shucked… no thanks. c

Someone (Colleen Oz) just posted this in the thread on KT about French press coffee and I thought of this thread and those who are put off by shrimp that hasn't been deveined.

"...time was in Bali where I tried Kopi Luwak, yes, the kind where the coffee beans are eaten by a (really cute) civet cat/luwak and then processed after they have been through its digestive tract."

Oysters aren't purged but "affiné" - a bit like the last stage of preparing cheese lol. They'e in a mixture of salt and clear water - otherwise they would be too salty to be nice to eat.

@olychick And the cherries the luwak has eaten (coffee beans are the seeds inside a red, cherry like fruit about the size of a ladyfinger grape) are thoroughly washed, then the outside fruit part removed and the beans taken out. The beans are then washed and dried, and then roasted over a hot fire. The chances of any foecal matter being left behind would have to be astronomically low.

So there’s no disconnect between the two viewpoints, they’re exactly the same. I’m not keen to eat poop.

@colleenoz, as I wrote on KT, I was really just joking about the similarity. Doesn't it make you wonder how anyone first discovered that treatment for coffee?

I think it started when the Balinese coffee farm workers weren’t allowed to have coffee beans from the farms they worked on, so they had to make do with what they could scrounge from the luwak droppings in the jungles.