The Target Shrimp With A 'Strange Taste' You Should Avoid Completely

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Frozen, peeled, and deveined shrimp are one of the best items you can keep in your freezer. They both defrost and cook quickly, allowing you to get dinner on the table easily. You can even cook them in an air fryer from frozen if you're really in a hurry. Although they are extremely convenient, not all frozen shrimp are created equal, with brands and types of shrimp varying widely in quality, taste, texture, and price. Wild-caught shrimp are touted as superior for both taste and sustainability reasons, and they usually are, but unfortunately, there's one type of wild-caught shrimp from Target that we highly recommend you avoid. 

In our article about which Target frozen seafood items to buy and skip, we advised readers to avoid purchasing Target's Good & Gather brand's Wild Caught Jumbo Raw Shrimp. We explained that the feedback on the product site was bleak, saying that "multiple people complain about the strange taste, which seems to be the biggest of many issues." There were a wide variety of negative reviews, with some saying that the product "tastes like chemicals or has a fishy profile that makes it taste spoiled." We continued to describe the comments, saying that many customers said that the crustacean was "virtually inedible, nasty, and stinky, and that it's actually the worst frozen shrimp they've purchased to date." While seafood should definitely have a light oceanic taste, it shouldn't taste overly fishy or have a strong smell. 

Reviews for Target's Good & Gather Wild Caught Jumbo Raw Shrimp also mention that the shrimp are not properly cleaned or deveined, with one customer on the product's page saying that they "had to thaw and devein nearly every shrimp and after cooking, couldn't even stomach eating them." Another customer wrote that trying the shrimp for the first time "literally made me sick after two bites... tastes disgusting, fishy and like chemicals." With all the negative reviews and work that you'd need to put into cleaning the shrimp, we recommend finding an alternative brand.

If you already have a bag of the shrimp in your freezer, you don't need to resort to throwing them out entirely. To salvage the bag of lackluster shrimp, defrost them overnight in your refrigerator or in a bowl of cool water in the sink if you plan to use them soon, and then make sure to thoroughly remove any veins or excrement still attached to the shrimp. While we don't recommend that you eat them whole due to their taste and texture, you could mince them up and make pork and shrimp shumai, as the dumplings will have a lot of other flavors to mask the subpar shrimp. If you're on the lookout for a great type of shrimp to have on hand for easy meals but don't know where to start, check out our ranking of frozen shrimp brands from worst to best.