Saturday, July 16, 2011

Garlic Prawns Recipe

Today's recipe is garlic prawns recipe by Liselle. If you love garlic and prawns, you definitely don't wanna miss this recipe. There are many different garlic prawns recipe, today we are showing you one of the ways to cook garlic prawns.

Garlic prawns recipe ingredients:
Sixteen grey prawns (Sea Prawns are much tastier)
One bulb of garlic (yes the whole thing)
One shot of wine (we'll show you the wine later)
Three teaspoons of Thai Fish Sauce
Two stalks of lemongrass

We love Garlic!

The prawns we got today are not so fresh plus they were kept in the fridge for a day before we have time to do this garlic prawns recipe. Get fresher and bigger prawns if possible because fresh prawns taste much better as we are steaming it.

Why lemongrass again? It was leftover from the Thai Green Curry Recipe we did previously. The preferred choice should be spring onion, basil or coriander leaves. Basil is not easily available here and spring onions don't last very long in the fridge, lemongrass on the other hand can easily last a few weeks, so let's not waste the leftovers.

This is the type of wine we used. A typical 'shao xing' which every Chinese household here would have. If you wanna cook this Garlic Prawns in western style, you can replace this wine with white wine, they go well with prawns too.
White wine always go well with 'white' meat (e.g. prawns, fish, clams) and red wine always go well with 'red meat' (e.g. beef, lamb, pork). This theory applies for cooking and also eating but it is just a guide. We have seen Jamie Oliver pour white wine to cook lamb and venison while we can basically drink beer to go with any meat just because we love beer.
Chop up the bulb of garlic nicely.

Fry it in about 2 tablespoons of oil until fragrant. Add a teaspoon of salt and sugar to taste. While waiting for the garlic to cool, we'll prepare the prawns.

Cut open the back of the prawns. You can use the scissors like me or you can use your knife. The eyes and feelers of the prawns were cut off before we started preparing. It's first basic thing we should do to the prawns the moment they were brought home.

Delicately peel off the shell of the prawns while leaving the head and tail intact. Keeping the head is important as they are the source of the prawn taste when you cook them. Keeping the tail is just for aesthetic purposes.

Remove the intestine of the prawns. Censored for your pleasure of viewing!

There you go! Nice and clean. Head and tail intact. I almost destroyed a prawn head while peeling the shell and a tail almost came off on the other one.

Lay it flat on your chopping board and slice the back of the prawns to open it flat.

It should look something like this~

Then we add the shot of wine and yes, 3 teaspoons of Thai Fish Sauce to enhance the taste. You may or may not include the fish sauce, it doesn't matter. But we mentioned before that we love fish sauce and we can basically cook everything with it.

Spread the fried garlic over the back of the prawns evenly.

Decorate the top with some lemongrass and it is ready to go. Preheat the steamer until the water inside is boiling..

Put the plate of garlic prawns into the steamer and cook for about 5 minutes. The duration of cooking depends on the size of your prawns. If you got big prawns, you have to cook it longer. If you're not sure whether it's cooked, you can open it up to check. As long as the prawns turn red and the body curls up, it is cooked..Prawns taste better undercooked than overcooked. If you have tried sashimi fresh prawns before, you will know what I mean! But it has to be fresh!

Auntie Liselle presents the dish of the day - Garlic Prawns!

Suck the meat right from the middle. The garlic taste is very intense, if you love garlic like us, you would love this dish. If you don't like garlic, you wouldn't even be reading this would you?

Hope you've liked this Garlic Prawns recipe brought to you by Jolly Liselle. Try it at home some day! As we mentioned earlier, there are many different ways to cook garlic prawns, next time we will try another type.

6 comments:

  1. Hummmmm, they look yummy! We cook the prawns in Spain in a similar way, it is called "Gambas al ajillo", and they are delicious! We use garlic, olive oil, salt and white wine only :)
    Kisses

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  2. @Raquel: Thanks for telling us that! Gambas al ajillo is indeed very similar, white wine goes very well with seafood. Only thing we don't use it a lot with our food here is because white wine is much more expensive than the chinese wine here.

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  3. Haha, that censored picture is funny! Liselle is a nice cook, so to see, looks really tastable, what you guys made. Bon apetit!

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  4. Many thanks Liselle for showing us that delicious way of preparing prawns! We get very hungry as always while following your recipe posts haha :-)

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  5. @potamotrygorgeous: Thanks for your lovely comments :D Liselle is flattered and she'll continue to bring us more tasty recipes!

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  6. @Leona Löwenherz: You are welcome Leona, we are extremely happy that you liked our recipe posts! If you have any ideas or suggestions, they are greatly welcomed! ^_^

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