Garlic Butter Shrimp Scampi

This recipe for garlic butter shrimp scampi is so easy to make. It's light, bright, and has a little punch of garlic and lemon in a butter sauce.

I recently had an AMAZING garlic butter shrimp scampi dish. You'll never guess where it was from. I'll tell you in a minute. But... ever since I've had that dish, I've been working to recreate it. To capture the lightness of the dish. The delicious pasta. The lemon, the garlic, the BUTTER.

So. Where was this fantastic garlicy and light shrimp scampi from? Disney World. More precisely... the fancy Italian restaurant (Tutto Italia) in Epcot at Disney World.

I used dried linguine  for shrimp scampi because I wanted to make this quick and easy, but this would be incredible with homemade, fresh pasta. You can of course use spaghetti if you don't have any linguine on hand. (Or angel hair pasta, or even penne or other types of pasta if that's what you have).

Ingredients

• Shrimp (fresh or thawed if frozen)
• Pasta
• Lemon (zest and juice)
• Butter
• Olive oil
• Garlic clove
• Fresh parsley
• Salt and pepper

How to make with frozen shrimp

If you have frozen, unthawed shrimp, you can still make this garlic butter shrimp scampi! Instead of cooking for 2-3 minutes per side, you'll just cook the frozen shrimp for longer. I find that I usually cook my shrimp for 8 minutes on one side, and then only 3-4 minutes after flipping.

However, watch your shrimp carefully. You want to cook until it's opaque and pink, but not much longer than that or it will be tough.

Recipe notes

• Every stove is different. I cook on a gas stove, but you might find that medium heat cooks the shrimp too slowly. If so, cook the shrimp for longer or turn the heat up on your stove.
• When cooking the shrimp, flip them when they start to get pink and opaque.
• You can definitely add parmesan cheese to this dish if you'd like! I've tried it with and without, and even though I'm usually a huge parmesan cheese lover, I prefer it without on this dish. If you do use parmesan, I recommend freshly grated or shaved.
• If you're using fresh linguine and not dried, please note that the cooking time will be much shorter, so you may want to prepare the pasta after the shrimp is already cooking instead of starting it at the beginning.
• This recipe uses fresh lemon zest. To zest, I use a microplane similar to this one.

More shrimp recipes

• Air fryer shrimp scampi
• Lemon orzo soup with shrimp
• Air fryer frozen shrimp
• Calabrian shrimp
• Air fryer pesto shrimp
• Orzo with shrimp and capers