Ebisen: Japanese shrimp crackers

Whether it’s potato chips or tortilla chips, flavors are added after chips are fried. But shrimp chips or crackers are different as shrimp bits or powder is mixed in dough. Shrimp crackers are popular snacks throughout Asian countries, but the recipes are different.

Dough for shrimp crackers are made of flour, tapioca starch or rice flour. Most widely eaten prawn crackers in Southeast Asia including Indonesia and Thailand use tapioca starch. It seems like they use ground shrimps as part of the ingredients. They have porous and light texture, but contain good amount of oil, so it gets a little greasy.

Shrimp cracker dough that uses tapioca starch pop when deep fried.
It’s fun to watch it.

Japanese snack brand Calbee’s Kappa Ebisen is one of the longest-selling snacks in Japan. It uses flour. (By the way, kappa in Japanese is a fictional yokai (supernational entities) that was believed to live in river or lake. The brand name has nothing to do with the Greek alphabet.) Ebisen is short for ebi senbei. Ebi means shrimps, and senbei means rice cracker – although Kappa Ebisen uses flour. Kappa Ebisen’s texture is little bit thicker and denser than other types of shrimp crackers.　According to Calbee, the shrimps caught in Japan, China, Canada, USA are used.

Calbee’s Kappa Ebisen is one of the most popular snacks in Japan.

Yet another types of ebisen, traditional Japanese shrimp crackers, use rice flour. Senbei, or rice crackers, usually has pretty hard texture. Large ones take some serious biting, which add extra enjoyment for senbei fans. (It’s a bit like the crust of French baguette.) Small ones are not that hard, but it’s a lot crunchier than other types of chips or crackers. Traditional rice crackers often use sakura ebi, which is a very small species that is caught then it is less than 1 cm long. It feels like rice flour preserves shrimps’ nuttiness the most. If you want to taste disinct shrimp flavors, I’d recommend ebisen made of rice flour.