The Kingdom of a King Prawn

King Prawns Poached in oil with caramelized onion buttermilk sauce served with Lime Sabayon, poached garlic, preserved prawn roe in oil

Cooking king prawns is a challenge, they look fantastic in the fish market, giant body, big claws, hues of blue all over the body, it looks like an alien animal to me at times, inside the crust of this crustacean lays the tender soft flesh, which is a delicate protein. In India there are so many amazing recipes with prawns n king prawns and one of them is the timeless classic: Chingrir Malaicurry aka Prawn Malaicurry, some people say they are the best with king prawns, I don’t think so, they are just as good if not better with medium sized prawns, but if you are cooking with king prawns it will be a huge disappointment when you end up with solid hard prawns, literally overcooked. But then when I think of it, it has become an established texture in here when it comes to prawns, we do eat prawns when they are not very soft but a bit firm, a bit chewy and we enjoy it, but sometimes it’s goes a bit too much due to overcooking, I remember eating king prawns at house-parties where they have become so solid, eating that was a mess.

While creating this recipe I approached the king prawns softly, ha-ha, well I mean I cooked them, beginning at low temperature, because the prawn protein is delicate n overcooks easily at high temperatures, low temperature cooking gives a great result, I start with immersing the marinated prawns in cold oil and I let the oil go hot slowly but I never let the oil reach a very high temperature, for doing this first of all you need a thick bottom saucepan, if you don’t have that you can always layer a saucepan over another flat pan or over a heat diffuser, in that way the temperature will be consistent n never go high quickly. Cooked in this way the prawns will stay soft n moist even after hours.

I infused the oil with dry red chili n garlic n red onion; the infused oil delivers the flavor to the prawns submerged in them. I serve the prawns with white rice; the best combination possible with lime sabayon which is light, foamy n has the citrus flavor. The poached onions are further sautéed in the pan concentrating their flavor even more n I finish them with buttermilk which gives a slight tang.

You can fry the shells in hot oil until they go crispy and you can eat them! They will provide the crispy crunch in the dish. The prawn roe preserved in oil adds a unique flavor; it has that umami rich flavor which is still mellow n just wonderful. For a little sweetness I used red bell pepper jus but it is just optional. For freshness the use of fresh coriander leaves is unbeatable, I love the flavor that goes so well with this dish, the sesame micro herbs doesn’t provide a boost of flavor but adds a fresh crunch n nutrition to the whole thing.

I used cumin thyme salt in the final serving, I keep it at a place so that someone can eat it at their will, for preparing the salt you need to roast some cumin seed on medium heat for about 2-3 minutes until they becomes fragrant n then crush them to a coarse powder, mix sea salt along with dry thyme leaves with the cumin powder and you got thyme cumin salt.

So now I will take you to the recipe.

For The Recipe: You will need

For the Prawns:

King prawns- 200 gm take the vein out from the tail end but keep the shells on

Vegetable oil – 2 cups

Shallots or red onion- 1 medium, sliced

Garlic -6 medium cloves, cut into long thin slices

Buttermilk- 4 tbsp

Turmeric- ½ tsp

Dry red chili-1 medium, chopped roughly

Red chili powder- ¼ tsp

Cumin powder-1/4 tsp

Red chili flakes- ¼ tsp

Salt

For the Sabayon:

Egg yolk-2

Butter-30 gm, melted

Lime/lemon-1 tbsp

Water- 1 n 1/2 tbsp

White wine- 1 tbsp

Salt

Black pepper

For the prawn roe in oil:

Prawn roe, extracted from the belly of the prawns in any- as much as u get

Vegetable oil- 4 tbsp

Salt- some pinches

1. Begin by marinating the prawns with shells with turmeric n salt, sprinkle the turmeric n salt n leave them for about 15-25 minutes, after that time wash them well in water to remove the excess salt n turmeric n pat them dry. Take a saucepan which is narrow, in that way you can get a good height of oil to submerge the prawns in a little amount of oil, so pour the vegetable oil in a heavy bottom narrow saucepan n add the sliced onion n the garlic n chili slices, if you don’t have a heavy bottom saucepan, keep the saucepan on top of another frying pan, then put the heat on to low to medium, we are infusing the oil with the garlic n onion, you need to give it about 10-15 minutes like this, at the end of the time the garlic n onion will seem to sizzle slightly  n leave bubbles from them, the garlic should not change color, they will still remain white n the onions will be very soft, take them out with a spoon n put them in another frying pan, put the narrow saucepan away from the heat for 5 minutes, then add the prawns in the oil making sure they submerge in the oil completely and put them on low heat, keep aside some of the garlic poached previously n add the rest in this oil,  nothing will seem to happen at first but the work is already happening, the mild heat of the oil is poaching them gently, give them about 5-8 minutes in oil, as time passes the prawns will turn very red or orange n will begin to leave bubbles from them n sizzle slightly in that oil, check after 7 minutes by taking out a prawn n cutting it through with a knife, it should be white inside n should be very soft, they will be ready after 8-10 minutes, take them out.

2. Put the frying pan with the onions on low medium heat, let the onions brown a bit, and when they are brown add the red chili flakes, chili powder n cumin powder along with salt n 2 tbsp buttermilk, give them 2 minutes, if they buttermilk has completely dried up add the rest now, mix well, taste n adjust, its ready.

3. For preserving the prawn roe in oil, sprinkle salt over the roe, heat the oil in a pan but not to smoke point, then pour the medium hot oil over the roe, give them an hour, this oil n the roe is now ready to be used, will stay in the freeze for 2 weeks.

4. For the sabayon, combine the egg yolks n water n white wine in a bowl, whisk with a wire whisk over a bain-marie until the eggs become very light n airy, take the bowl off the heat every 10 seconds to make sure the eggs don’t scramble,  taste it after 1 minute of whisking, it should not taste very much of eggs, keep whisking for 1 minute, when the mixture becomes airy take it off the heat and continue whisking it until it becomes very light, then add the melted butter, then add the lime juice n season with salt n pepper, this light lime froth is ready to be served.

So we are done, for serving I will suggest white rice goes amazing with these prawns, take a little rice, add the caramelized onion sauce over them, then add some of the reserved garlic cloves n some roe, take the shells out of the king prawns and add some fresh coriander or parsley n little bit of sabayon, take a bite, let the eyes remain closed, Bon appétit.

Stupid Mayonnaise

                                                                                                                There in the middle of the night I was whisking like mad! Like a lunatic who has the hope of finding the true meaning of his existence by whisking egg yolks with oil with his range of secret ingredients and the truth will emerge out of the churned mayonnaise! Huh!  I was hoping to get it absolutely brilliant as i imagined it will be! Darn it! My mayonnaise finally curdled, so there at 12.30 in the night I threw everything away and went to sleep. Damn the mayonnaise!  And I told myself before going to sleep that I won’t touch that stupid mayonnaise again tomorrow; it got the patience jump out the window of me.

                                                                                                                                                      Next morning I realized I have neck pain, as if it could not have gone better. My mood was good surprisingly, I didn't dream of the mayonnaise. The mayonnaise has now become literally a pain in the neck; I tried to recall what I was thinking when I decided to make mayonnaise, I couldn't recall. So with a neck pain I finished my sketches and then went back to the curdled mayonnaise to fix it. I stared with a new egg yolk, adding my curdled mayo drop by drop while whisking. Now the thing  is I wasn't using any electric hand beaters, being energetic and young I took the challenge of doing it literally with my hands without any double thinking and even Julia Child suggests not to make mayo with beaters because the mixture gets so stiff it puts an enormous amount of toil on the motor. So imagine what my shoulders went through! But then if I think isn't that what electric motors are supposed to do? They are supposed to reduce the stressful repetitive work for humans, and there I was choosing the other way around. God knows why!

                                                                             I think I have solved the problem if I look at the process of making mayo from another point of view, rather than approaching  to make mayo with the mindset that “Oh I am gonna make home-made mayo with my own hands with the oscillating fear in mind that any point of time the mayo might curdle ruining all my hard work”, we need to approach mayo making with this mindset “ well I am gonna have a heavy arm workout, I need to some solid arm workout and after the workout I will have mayonnaise in my hands !” Walla! Do you see what a difference it makes!

                          I must tell you this dear reader that I have found the perfect way to make mayo and not getting you mad and shouting at everyone at the end of it. The secret is to “FAIL FIRST, CURDLE FIRST”. Once you have failed first the fear of curdling had got out of your mind which is relaxing. So begin by whisking adding oil drop by drop to the egg yolks, but then don’t forget that you are supposed to fail in this, you are supposed to curdle it by doing it wrong. So once you have done the wrong thing, take a little break and start with a fresh new egg yolk! In that way you will get less irritated and less mad at yourself, which is so cool. What will still be the same is the amount of hard hand-work, the mixture gets so stiff the whisk literally stand in it! So whisking becomes a real challenge.

 Anyways I am not gonna suggest you to make mayo by yourself because if I do you will end up cursing me! So just read it and forget it, don’t try to make it.

By the way my mayonnaise turned out to be very tasty, that’s the only positive against 4 negatives. I flavored my mayo with tamarind chutney which gave it a light brown color and amazing tanginess, roasted cumin powder, some asafetida/ hing adding its beautiful flavor and lastly a touch of honey. So it is a very special mayonnaise. If you were here I would have given you to taste it. Bon appétit!       

The recipe: you will need

2 egg yolks

1 tbsp of Tamarind pulp or Tamarind Chutney

1/4^th tbsp of Asafetida/Hing

1 tsp of honey

½ tsp of cumin powder

1 clove of garlic, crushed

Pinch of red chili powder

225 ml of soybean/groundnut /sunflower oil

¾ tsp of salt

½-1 tsp of white wine vinegar

Freshly milled black pepper

Plus 1 extra egg yolk for the FAIL FIRST process

TIPS: Use a small basin with a narrow base, also try to choose something heavy which will move less as you whisk.  Place the heavy basin or mortar and pestle (I did it in mortal and pestle itself) over a damp cloth so that it will remain steady. Warm the basin or bowl slightly before you start to make the mayo, it ensured that mixture won’t curdle easily.

1.      1.. First crush the garlic in the slightly warmed mortar n pestle with a little salt, then add the egg yolks, freshly milled black pepper, tamarind chutney, cumin powder, hing, red chili powder, salt. Mix this entire together very well.  Then with the whisk in one hand, and the jug of oil or sauce dropper filled with oil in another hand add a drop of oil and mix it in.

2.    2.   Then add another drop of oil and mix in it. The key to successful mayo is every drop of oil must be well incorporated before the next drop is added. Now you might ask this will take the whole day! No it won’t, half an hour. After you do this for a couple of minutes, you can add the oil in a very thin steady thread while whisking and it will be fine. Mayo mostly curdles in the beginning when you add too much oil too quickly. Also as in my case my mayo curdled at the last stages when I was thinking Oh! Now it won’t curdle but it did too much oil too quickly. Also mayo will curdle if you surpass the maximum proportions of ¾ th cup of oil per egg yolk. So the oil has been added in droplets until the sauce is commenced to thicken. So the key words are “WARM BOWL”, “DROPLETS OF OIL WHISKED EVERY TIME UNTIL THE SAUCE THICKENS”, and “MAX. ¾ TH CUP OF OIL PER EGG YOLK”.  So after some minutes when you have added several drop of oil to the mixture, it will go very stiff, when it gets there add the white wine vinegar, it will thin the mixture down.

3.      3. Now start pouring the oil in a very very thin and steady steam while whisking all the time, take a little break in between. We are humans not some motor! Stop sometimes, whisk really well making sure all the oil is incorporated. So like this when you have finished all the oil, taste it, season with salt if you think it needs. Now add some more freshly milled black pepper and the honey and whisk in. if you think your mayo is very thick just add 2 tbsp of boiling water and whisk in.       

          

             

            

         So now if your mayo is curdled like mine, be happy, this is what we aimed for remember. Take a break, come back and start with a fresh egg yolk in a warm bowl. Beat it well, then add 1 drop of the curdled mixture, whisk and add one more drop, whisk. Do it for a couple of minutes and just keep doing until all the mixture is used up. There you have it! So if you have done it and in your hands you have the perfect mayo I am gonna pat your shoulders and shout “you are a hero, you have made mayonnaise! Bravo!”

That’s all folks. Don’t forget FAIL FIRST.   

                         

My delicious adventure with Ratatouille

Last evening when the setting sun was melting in the horizon, I finished making my ratatouille; my kitchen was filled up with the sweet savory smell of the red bell peppers, the aubergine, and the garlic.  An hour before was when it all started, lazily soaking the sun I was going through one of my dear cookbooks “Recipes from a Provencal Kitchen” by Michael Biehn, and my mind got stuck smelling the ratatouille from the book. Well it was not a logical cause n effect situation as you might think because I did make the ratatouille after reading it, the story is, prior to that evening while I was at the market my eyes met a young slender courgette and 1 sensational red bell pepper and 1 friendly yellow bell pepper and my mind uttered “Ratatouille! Ratatouille!” So how come I just walk away from such a scene but not end up carrying them home! I did.

Do you remember the film called “Ratatouille” by the studio of Pixar? What a beautiful and brilliant film! I can almost imagine when they decided to make that film, the animation director Brad Bird n Jan Pinkava might have inspired all the artists by saying perhaps…”we are going to make a film on cooking and food, I know it is a huge challenge, because the film is going to be animated but then how come we make a great film without a great challenge! So friends we are just not going to make a film on the passion of cooking and food, our film will be the best film ever on cooking and food… it must inspire people to cook and give anyone courage who ever seeks it, so let’s start cooking. ..Bon Appétit!”  Now the reality of my imagined part might have been different but it is no further in the spirit of it. My dear reader I hope you have watched that film, if you haven’t, I insist you to watch this film, you will cherish it.

                                                                                                                                                              Remy, The rat, the very talented rat who cooked with so much love n passion and his hands were the hands of the human Linguini! Quite something! Now my hands are of my own and I am yet to figure out what kind of rat I am?

      While I was going through the recipe in the book I tried to imagine how it will look like and taste like which is not a very easy thing to do. The recipe in the book calls for 2 hours of slow cooking, so I could imagine it will be like some kind of stew of all those lovely veggies and in its texture, it will be mushy and intense in its flavor. The thing is with any recipe , there exists many variations of it e.g. in the film Ratatouille it is done in different way, where the round discs of the veggies are arranged in a concentric circle over a base of tomato sauce, then baked which is visually pleasing. The version however I opted for is the more classic way, homely way and it tastes delicious.

                                                                                                               
  I remember while I was reading it, rerunning it in my mind, there was this breeze outside, playing with the leaves of the trees. My mind was filled up with ideas that I incorporated in my version of ratatouille! So in my version, there is use of cloves, long cumin seeds (“shahi jeera” in India), dry red chili, fresh coriander leaves, coriander power, turmeric and red chili powder and pink rock salt. With all these additions the resulting ratatouille is amazingly fragrant and very yummy! The interesting thing is it tastes even better when cold or the next day, so I literally found myself licking the spoon even eating it from my refrigerator.

                                                                                                                                                       

   Such a wonderful dish where all the vegetables have absorbed and shared the flavor of each other! intensifying in the process of doing so. There is use of little sugar which balances the slightly bitter flavor of the courgettte and the acidity from the tomatoes; it improves the taste of the dish to a great extent.  At the very end of cooking I added a little finely chopped garlic into it and no more cooking is needed after that, it is a little touch of garlic at the end. For someone who is a vegetarian, it will be a delightful dish for him and a meat lover would just crave for it with his meat. My mother who is very choosy about what she eats ended up loving this ratatouille, she had with it a soft white bread and I had it with white rice. Now talking of bread I think it will be so wonderful to use this as a spread  of a piece of toasted bread with a little drizzle of olive oil or melted butter, it will be sensational I tell you. I wonder why people don’t make ratatouille more often, I hear about it so less, it needs a revival and in my version it is so satisfying. Now  after making it I realize I have eaten  similar food in traditional Bengali cuisine, where they resemble this in terms of its texture completely, in a very general term in Indian cooking it will called “Mixed veg”, “Mixed Sabzi”, “Ghyat”- where different kinds of veggies come together and slow cooked for a long period of time.

      

   My dear reader  as you go through my words, there are many visuals created in your mind and they are now just waiting for you to get up, gather your veggies , chop them up, start the cooking and after  an hour it will be right there in front of you.  Bon AppétitJ

 

1 large aubergine                                                         ½ red bell pepper

1 courgette                                                                   ½ yellow bell pepper

1 ½ medium red onion                                               1 ½-2 very ripe medium tomatoes

4 medium cloves of garlic                                          1 bay leaf

1 small sprig of thyme                                                4 sprig of fresh coriander leaves

1 tsp shahi jeera                                                          2 cloves

Pinch of pink rock salt                                                ½ tsp of sugar

½ tsp of red chili powder                                           ¼ tsp of turmeric

½ tsp of coriander powder                                        ½ broken dry red chili

Olive oil or soya bean oil or mustard oil                                          salt to taste

The Recipe above

Begin by chopping the aubergine and the courgette into ½ inch cubes, no need to peel them, just tail them. For the bell peppers cut them in half, remove the stalks, de-seed, Core and cut into square pieces. Peel the ripe tomatoes by pouring over them boiling water and keeping them immersed in that water for 1 min, then plunge in cold water and peel them, remove and discard the seeds if you want to, I kept the seeds in and dice them in cubes. Peel the red onions, chop them up roughly. You will also need 3-4 of unpeeled garlic cloves. Chop the coriander leaves roughly.

In a cast iron pot or in a big pan, heat 3 tbsp of olive oil or soya bean oil, I used a mix of mustard oil and soya bean oil; I used mustard oil for its flavor. When the oil is moderately hot, reduce the flame and put the cloves, shahi-jeera, dry red chili (throw away the seeds) and bay leaf and give them 30 seconds, then add the onions, increase the flame to medium, make them go moderately brown, then add the red and yellow bell peppers, the aubergines and let them brown until they are a nice golden color. Now as you add the aubergine you will find they will absorb all the oil from the pot, therefore add 1tbsp of more oil. Add a pinch of sugar now as you are sautéing the aubergine and the bell peppers on a medium heat. Add the courgettes and allow them to brown a little, add another pinch of sugar, then add the tomatoes, the garlic cloves, thyme, and 1 tbsp of chopped coriander leaves. Give them about 5 mins on medium heat, add the rest of the sugar now, mix well, then add 2 pinches of rock salt, then the salt. Stir thoroughly and increase the heat to high until the vegetables reach simmering point, while I was doing it there wasn’t much juice left in the pan to reach simmering point, so I kept them on the move at times so they won’t catch the pan. Reduce the temperature, cover and cook gently for 5 minutes, meantime dissolve the red chili powder, turmeric, coriander powder in 2 tsp of water and add it to the pan, mix well and give it another 10- 15mintues, stir in between so that it doesn’t catch the pan.  After that time, remove the lid and continue cooking for 5-10minutes uncovered until all the excess liquid has evaporated. Stir occasionally while the mixture reduces, the flavor now has intensified, stir them in between so they don’t catch the pan, if you see brown bits in the pan, that means it is catching a little, there is nothing wrong, spring a tsp of water and the brown bits will melt away. Check for the salt to taste, adjust if necessary , just before putting the flame off, add a finely chopped garlic clove to the vegetables, put off the flame and cover it, give it 5mintues of standing time. Now you are ready to serve and serve it piping hot or it even tastes better when cold, I absolutely enjoy it eating cold.

This ratatouille is great in its flavor; the sweetness from the sugar and bell peppers, the heat from the chili powder, the flavor of the vegetables mixed together makes it an awesome dish to eat. If you are not comfortable with chili, you can reduce it according it to your taste. Dear reader I wish you happy eating.