This 20 minute honey garlic shrimp is a reader favorite recipe. It’s extra quick, very simple, and delivers big flavor. Served with brown rice and vegetables or over a salad, this healthy dish is sure to join your regular dinner rotation.
Are you looking for a super quick, yet flavorful dinner this week? We have it right here for you. This saucy shrimp owes a lot of its flavor to a bold marinade of honey, soy sauce, and garlic, which is music to everyone’s taste buds. For a little extra flavor, we add some minced fresh ginger, but that’s entirely optional.
Video Tutorial
Tell Me About This Honey Garlic Shrimp
- Flavor: The marinade is loaded with flavor, but our favorite part of this dish is the beautiful caramelized bits of honey and garlic stuck to the pan and edges of the shrimp. Scrape it all up to serve because you don’t want to miss those flavorful bites.
- Ease: Regardless of your skill level, this is a very easy dinner recipe. Prepare the marinade, use half for marinating the shrimp, then use the rest as the sauce for cooking the shrimp. It’s convenient that the marinade is also the sauce—we do this for our maple sesame salmon and honey garlic salmon recipes too.
- Time: The shrimp takes 5 minutes to cook on the stove, while the marinating takes another 15. You’ll have this unbelievably tasty and simple meal on your table in about 20 minutes.
Choosing the Right Ingredients for Honey Garlic Shrimp
- Shrimp. You can use fresh or frozen raw shrimp. Thaw the shrimp completely before starting. Be sure to peel and devein the shrimp first. You can leave the tails on or remove if desired. If using already cooked shrimp, see recipe note below.
- Honey + garlic + soy. This marinade/sauce is packed with so much glorious flavor and is inspired by some wonderful flavors often used in Asian cuisine. (We also LOVE this honey soy glazed salmon from Omnivore’s Kitchen.)
- Green onions. This optional garnish adds freshness and a nice color contrast.
Overview: How to Make 20 Minute Honey Garlic Shrimp
The full printable recipe is below, but let’s walk through it so you understand each step before you get started.
- Make your marinade.
- Marinate the shrimp. Combine marinade and shrimp and marinate for at least 15 minutes or up to 8-12 hours. We usually only marinate it for about 15 minutes and during this time, you could prepare your side dishes such as steamed vegetables and instant brown rice.
- Cook the shrimp. Cook shrimp in a little olive oil, then flip and pour in the remaining sauce until cooked through.
- Garnish. Top with green onions and serve.
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20 Minute Honey Garlic Shrimp
- Prep Time: 15 minutes
- Cook Time: 5 minutes
- Total Time: 20 minutes
- Yield: serves 4
- Category: Dinner
- Method: Cooking
- Cuisine: American
Description
This 20 minute honey garlic shrimp is a reader favorite recipe. It’s extra quick, very simple, and delivers big flavor. Served with brown rice and vegetables or over a salad, this healthy dish is sure to join your regular dinner rotation.
Ingredients
- 1/3 cup honey
- 1/4 cup soy sauce (we usually use reduced sodium)
- 2 garlic cloves, minced (or 1 teaspoon jarred minced garlic)
- optional: 1 teaspoon minced fresh ginger
- 1 lb medium uncooked shrimp, peeled & deveined
- 2 teaspoons olive oil
- optional for garnish: chopped green onion
Instructions
- Whisk the honey, soy sauce, garlic, and ginger (if using) together in a medium bowl. You will use half for the marinade in step 2 and half for cooking the shrimp in step 3.
- Place shrimp in a large sealable container or zipped-top bag. Pour 1/2 of the marinade/sauce mixture on top, give it all a shake or stir, then allow shrimp to marinate in the refrigerator for 15 minutes or for up to 8-12 hours. Cover and refrigerate the rest of the marinade for step 3. (Time-saving tip: while the shrimp is marinating, we usually steam broccoli and microwave some quick brown rice.)
- Heat olive oil in a skillet over medium-high heat. Place shrimp in the skillet. (Discard used marinade.) Cook shrimp on one side until pink, about 45 seconds, then flip shrimp over. Pour in remaining marinade/sauce and cook it all until shrimp is cooked through, about 1-2 more minutes.
- Serve shrimp with cooked marinade sauce and a garnish of green onion. The sauce is excellent on brown rice and steamed vegetables on the side.
Notes
- Special Tools (affiliate links): Glass Mixing Bowls | Skillet
- Thicken the sauce? Some readers add 1 teaspoon of cornstarch to the second half of the sauce that will be used for cooking in step 3. This thickens the sauce so it isn’t as watery. To do this, use a fork to mix 1 teaspoon of cornstarch with 1 teaspoon warm water. Once cornstarch has dissolved, stir this into the sauce before using it in step 3.
- Garlic: If using fresh garlic that you mince yourself, use 2 cloves. If using refrigerated jarred minced garlic, use 1 teaspoon (or more, to taste).
- Shrimp: You can remove the tail or leave it on. We recommend using fresh shrimp, but you can use frozen. Thaw before marinating and cooking. If using frozen cooked shrimp, thaw, marinate, and cook as directed. You’ll really just be heating the shrimp up in the sauce.
- Consuming leftover marinade is a debated topic. While you could boil it to rid any contamination, the flavor could possibly change. Do what you’d like. In this recipe we only use half of the sauce for the marinade so we have more for cooking. (We discard the used marinade in step 3.)
Keywords: honey garlic shrimp
this was Very good! made a little extra sauce to serve over rice, excellent.
Delicious, but a bit too sweet. We used dried garlic granules, powdered ginger and added salted peanuts at the end, and Sriracha. Wonderful over rice, with steamed broccoli. Will definitely make it again, but with a little less honey.
★★★★
The shrimp is so good! I steamed some broccolini and red bell peppers for a few minutes, then threw them in with the shrimp after turning, along with halved cherry tomatoes and poured over the remaining marinade. Served over brown rice. Delicious!!
★★★★★
Excellent. Perfect & easy recipe.
★★★★★
OMG.. I made this tonight and my family loved it.. Plates were clean before I blinked.. So delicious..
★★★★★
Made this for the first time tonight. I don’t know why ginger is listed as optional because it really makes the dish. I added red pepper strips to the oil before adding the shrimp. They were tasty. The sauce was thin so a quick addition of water with cornstarch thickened that up nicely. This dish will easily hit a normal rotation at our house.
★★★★
Not a hit in my house.
★
I followed the recipe exactly. This was so sweet, I found it difficult to eat. In fact, I made myself something else to it. The flavor lacks complexity. However, my husband was happy to eat it and thought it was good, so 3 stars. I wish I had reduced the honey, drastically, and added some complexity with Sesame oil.
★★★
Is it okay to leave it in marinade more than the recommended 8-12 hours? I put it in the marinade around 9-10pm last night and wanted to make it for dinner tonight.
What can be used to thicken sauce if you don’t have corn starch? Flower?
My family approved and said I can add it to the rotation. Win!! Thanks for the recipe!!
★★★★★
This was delicious and very easy. Great recipe Next I am trying the teriyaki shrimp recipe on this site.
★★★★★
Really good and for once actually took the amount of time it did it would unlike most other recipes lol I did add a little corn starch slurry to thicken the sauce after I took the shrimp out next time I will be making extra sauce for the rice it was so good ! Thank you for this recipe saved my dinner funk!
★★★★★
Very easy and oh so good!
★★★★★
So good! Quick and Easy! I added a pinch of red pepper flakes in the bag for marinating, and a squeeze of fresh lime once finished. Thanks Sally!
★★★★★
This is soooooo delicious and easy! I used fresh garlic and added the optional ginger (because I had it on hand) and it really added to the flavor. I also added a heaping teaspoon of corn starch dissolved in a couple of tablespoons of water when the shrimp and marinade were in the pan. Next time, I would double the sauce (keeping the extra for the pan and not the marinade) and perhaps add brocolli or some other green vegetable to the pan with the shrimp. I served it over a combination of vermicelli and rice with raisins and the hubs loved it! This is definitely going into the regular rotation. Can’t wait to make it again. Thank you Sally!
★★★★★
Very good. I like to add some red pepper flakes to the pan for some extra kick.
★★★★★
I have a two lb. bag of frozen shrimp. Should I use all of it?
I had 2 lbs also so I just doubled the sauce
I don’t have any rice on hand…. any good second suggestions. Already have the shrimp marinating.
It’s also great over noodles!
Super easy, super delicious.
★★★★★
SOO good and easy!
★★★★★
I accidentally bought frozen cooked shrimp instead of uncooked. I’m not very great with food and figuring out solutions. Do you have any advice on how to make it work? Should I sear it? Do I still marinade it? Could I turn the marinade into a dipping sauce instead somehow? Please help! Thank you!
Hi Austin, If using frozen cooked shrimp, thaw, marinate, and cook as directed. You’ll really just be heating the shrimp up in the sauce. See the recipe notes for details.
My son (13) and I made this recipe last night. Everyone loved it. They said it was better than takeout. My daughter is gluten free so we used Tamari gluten free soy sauce and served over quinoa. It was yummy.
★★★★★
Was a GREAT recipe. I loved the sauce, everything about it was just right. It even had a good aftertaste! I did the shrimp in a cast iron, and I had to let them simmer in the sauce a bit longer than the recipe calls for! Instead of the brown rice I replaced it with quinoa, and I served with broccoli as well. Everyone loved it!
★★★★★
This recipe was delicious! I did make a few adjustments to it for our family food preferences. I switched out the soy sauce for Coconut Aminos because of a soy allergy. I didn’t have fresh ginger on hand, so I used ginger powder from my spice cabinet which seemed to work well. And the tweak I highly recommend is to add fresh mango cubes and red bell peppers. I added both the bell peppers and mango in advance, before I added the shrimp, to give them time to heat through. It made for a really great combination of flavors. I also added a little cornstarch at the end to thicken up the sauce and it worked like a charm. Thank you! I think this dish will become a regular in our household.
★★★★★
I made this last Friday and the only negative thing I cansayistst I didn’t make enough! This was really good! Chinese Take-out/Panda but much better! We paired it with rice and veg and I’ll be making this again very soon! Probably rotating it on Fridays with Shrimp Alfredo.
★★★★★
This recipe is so delicious and fast and easy. This is going to be one of my go to meals. Thank you for sharing.
★★★★★
Help! We love this recipe, made it twice, but we can not get the sauce to thicken up! Any suggestions ? Thank you!
★★★★
Hi Kaitlyn, When you pour the second half of the sauce into the pan in step 3 you can try whisking some corn starch into it before you pour it into the pan to thicken it up.
So easy, so good!
★★★★★
We loved this recipe! Super easy and delicious. I served it on top of quinoa and surrounded by baby peas.
★★★★★
This was great easy recipe. We whipped up marinade before leaving for work and added shrimp. Delicious easy dinner after long work day. It was great with asparagus. Might try marinade with added citrus to thin it a bit.
★★★★★