Prawns Tempura
Who doesn’t love a plate of freshly grilled tiger prawns? That delicious aroma and crunchy freshness bursts in your mouth as you bite into them! The main reason for this is that prawns are chockfull of umami flavour – also known as the 5th flavour and represents savouriness. Umami is taken from Japanese and it means “good taste”, which I’m sure you’ll agree with me on the taste of prawns.
The reason for this is that they are full of glutamates. If this sounds familiar, that’s because they are also known as monosodium glutamates, and you know them very well by their common name: MSG. Hence you can think of prawns as having natural MSG!
Another thing that you may have wondered about is if there is any difference between prawns and shrimps. If you were a marine biologist, there would be very specific differences to look out for, but since we’re not biologists, the way we differentiate them is through their size, with the larger shrimps being called prawns and the smaller ones called shrimps. Another point is that Americans prefer to use the word ‘shrimp’ while Commonwealth countries (like Singapore) prefer to use the word ‘prawn’ to describe them.
When cooking with prawns, the best way to retain the most flavour is to cook them in the shell. This is because the shells seal in the flavour which is why even plain boiled prawns are so delicious. However as not everybody wants to get their hands dirty while eating, cooking them without their shells is commonly done to make things more convenient for those eating it. Either way, you can grill them, sauté them, fry them, boil them (in the shell), and of course use them as part of stews and soups.
When preparing prawns, it is very common to devein the prawn, which is removing the dark intestinal tract that lies along its back. This is more important for the larger prawns where the pieces of grit in the vein can be larger while it will be undetectable in smaller prawns. And in reality, most prawns nowadays won’t have much grit inside as they are all farmed.
Deveining is really simple, just run a sharp knife along the vein line and extract the dark vein, rinsing the body after that. Some chefs remove the vein from the tail end so that they do not have to slice open the prawn which makes for better presentation but needs lots of practice to do it smoothly.
Besides deveining, another common thing to do is to save the shells and heads of the prawns to make prawn stock, where you fry them in garlic oil first to release the flavours then boil it in water and simmer down into stock. This gives you an aromatic stock concentrated with umami taste that you can use as a base for soups or stews.
Prawns form a major role in most cuisines around the world, mainly being used as flavouring or as an ingredient. For example in Spain, prawns used in one of the most famous and popular tapas dishes – gambas al ajillo – which is really easy to make so you can try your hand with this recipe here. In Japan, prawns are the most common ingredient for the popular deep-fried dish of tempura. It is another simple dish to try out, provided you’re not afraid of the hot oil! Another exotic dish that uses prawns is the ceviche from Peru. Instead of cooking it with heat, in this dish the prawns are instead cooked with the acidity from citrus juice! Try out this interesting recipe over here.
And in case you were still wondering, marine biologists differentiate true prawns (Dendrobanchiata) from true shrimps (Caridea) by their gill structures and the 2nd abdominal segment.
Suggested Prawn Recipes:
Gambas al Ajillo
Prawns Tempura
Prawn Ceviche
Prawn Aglio Olio
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