Why You Should Use A Skewer When Grilling Seafood

Fish and seafood can be tricky for some home cooks, but grilling with skewers can make the job easier, especially for those small seafood items.

Have you ever wondered where the skewer comes from or what its original function was, aside from allowing you to eat your food as if it were a savory popsicle? According to Eater New York, it is thought to have originated in what we know today as Iraq, and its purpose, per RecipeTips.com was to keep morsels of food together while cooking over a fire. The actual era of its origin is blurry, but the purpose of the thin stick, whether metal or wood, has not changed much over the centuries.

Grilling in general can be a challenge, and one of the reasons is that the food items often turn out dry. The solution, according to FoodEditorial.co, is marinade (duh) and thicker morsels (of fish in this case), with the latter suggestion hopefully addressing the issue of food slipping through the grill's spaces. This is also where skewers can come in handy.

Grilling seafood is different from cooking red meat or poultry. Even chicken is firmer than the most resilient piece of fish, per Culinary Lore. As such, seafood items cook relatively fast.

Let's take a look at our smaller members of the seafood group, like shrimp. Imagine the arduous task of placing them one at a time onto the grill. By the time you finish, you need to start turning them since jumbo shrimp will only take between two and three minutes to cook on either side — less time for smaller shrimp, per The Pioneer Woman. Without a skewer, the process will likely be slow because you need to be super careful, as one mistake can lead to the shrimp slipping through the grid and landing on the coals below. Impale your shrimp on a skewer and turning becomes faster, preventing it from drying out or burning in the embers at the bottom of the grill.

Using a seafood skewer is perfect for the grill and, according to Fox News, is less time-consuming since the food has been cut into small pieces.