Fremont Fish Market Beer Battered Shrimp

When I was a kid, I was convinced Red Lobster was the ultimate in fine dining. It’s still a favorite restaurant of mine, but as menu prices steadily increased over the years, and as children entered into the financial picture for my husband and me, we began to realize that we could save a lot of money by purchasing seafood at the grocery store. We learned a lot of seafood isn’t difficult to prepare at home, and we could even enjoy meals that were just as good as what we’d get at a restaurant, right down to the Cheddar Bay Biscuits.

We’ve also learned that Aldi offers a nice assortment of seafood for diners on a budget. We have boiled our share of lobster tails and crab legs (although we haven’t purchased crab legs in a while considering the most recent snow crab season was cancelled in Alaska). We’ve eaten seafood boils, seafood stew, scallops, and mussels. We have come to love the Mediterranean herb salmon from Aldi.

We’ve also tried a variety of shrimp from Aldi, including crispy stuffed shrimp, shrimp skewers, shrimp tacos, cocktail shrimp, tempura shrimp … Needless to say, as they indicate in Forrest Gump, there are a lot of different ways to serve shrimp.

Recently, I picked up these beer battered shrimp at Aldi in the Aldi Find freezer aisle. Spoiler: while my family likes most of the shrimp we’ve gotten from Aldi, we did not like these. Keep reading and you’ll see why.

Fremont Fish Market Beer Battered Shrimp cost $4.99 for a 9-ounce box at the time of publication. The box describes these as “authentic pub style beer battered shrimp easy to prepare and ready in minutes.”

These are an Aldi Find, so they’re only in stores for a short time. Each store gets one shipment, and after that sells out, they’re gone unless Aldi decides to bring them back at some later time. Aldi does not offer online ordering for products not in stock at your local store.

The shrimp are farm raised at BAP-certified farms. They were processed in the U.S.

If you’re looking out for allergens, these contain crustacean shellfish (shrimp) and wheat.

One box contains about 2.5 approximately six-shrimp servings. Our box had 14-15 shrimp, which more or less qualifies as 2.5 servings. One serving will net you 130 calories, 3 grams of total fat (4% DV), 0.5 grams of saturated fat (3% DV), 55 mg of cholesterol (18% DV), 610 mg of sodium (27% DV), 18 grams of total carbohydrates (7% DV), and no added sugars.

Nutrition information and ingredients. (Click to enlarge.)

The package has instructions for baking the shrimp in a conventional oven or air frying them. They should be cooked to an internal temperature of 145 degrees. Do not microwave the shrimp.

To bake in a conventional oven, preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Bake shrimp in an even layer for 14-16 minutes on a lightly greased or nonstick sheet pan, turning the shrimp over halfway through cooking for a crispier finish.

To air fry, spread shrimp into an even layer in the basket. Cook at 370 degrees for 6-7 minutes.

Shrimp after air frying.

I opted to cook these shrimp in our 6-quart Aldi air fryer, purchased in 2022. I cooked them for about 8 minutes, and they never got all that dark, but they did get crispy on the outside. I served them alongside some other Aldi seafood, including popcorn shrimp and jumbo scallops, and I served a spinach side salad with everything as well.

Inside a shrimp.

When I served these, though, they had a lot of mushy breading inside. In addition, these have a strange aftertaste and almost a chemical-like flavor. I served them with cocktail sauce, and it doesn’t make them taste better. I like a lot of different foods, and my family almost never finds ourselves in a situation where we deem food to be so terrible that we throw it out. However, these shrimp were so bad that family members weren’t eating their full servings, with one person even tossing their uneaten shrimp back onto the serving plate.

These tasted so bad that we ended up throwing away what was left after dinner, and there was discussion about these qualifying for our Disappointment of the Year in our annual Aldi Reviewer Awards. We were glad we had other shrimp, scallops, and salad to fill up on instead.

The Verdict:

Fremont Fish Market Beer Battered Shrimp looked really promising, and we had high hopes for these shrimp. However, the interior breading is mushy, and overall these have a weird chemical flavor and unpleasant aftertaste. We’re not sure what went wrong here, but we don’t recommend these. They are the most disappointing shrimp we’ve ever had.