Sambal Prawns

[khiemtran]

Four dishes down for our Chinese New Year open house tomorrow. Five to go tomorrow morning.

Comments

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

Those prawns look sooooo good! I wish I was near enough to swing by for the open house.;)

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

The next time you're in Sydney, you're most welcome to drop by! (I don't think I'm going to be sent to Cairo anytime soon...)

[aliettedb.livejournal.com]

Darn, now you're making me wish I lived closer :(

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

If you smelled chilli frying yesterday, it was probably me... (Although the fumes may take a day or two to drift across; they were certainly powerful!)

[soon_lee]

Looks delicious!

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

I've got a nagging suspicion I may have overdone it with the chilli. We'll find out today when our guests arrive...

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

So hungry right now...

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Fortunately, it turned out to be milder than I feared and no guests got their heads blown off. One guest did ask for the recipe though, and then skipped the step where I de-seeded the chillies. Apparently, her son suffered the consequences.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Guests with heads blown off would not be a pretty sight.

If you're giving out the recipe….

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

It's more of a strategy than a recipe but...

500 grams peeled prawns
15 birds eye chillies, seeded (The idea here is to maximise the fruit flavour for the desired amount of heat, so it's better to go for a vast amount of milder, disembowelled chillies than a smaller amount of stronger ones. If you don't have much chillies though, just use what you have and leave the seeds in.)
1 red capsicum
3 cloves garlic (or however much you feel like)
ginger (roughly the same amount as the garlic)
fish sauce (substituting here for belacan (fermented prawn paste) and also the salting agent)
sugar
cornflour (or other thickening agent)

Method:

Chop the garlic, ginger, chillies and capsicum.
Pound the chillies and capsicum in a mortar and pestle (don't know whether this is actually necessary)
Fry the garlic and ginger in a wok with peanut oil, until it becomes fragrant.
Add the chillies and capsicum and the fish sauce (I used about six shakes of the bottle, say three table spoons worth).
Fry until the smell changes noticeably and there's a nice "roasted" smell. There may start to be touches of brown in the ingredients, but you don't want the garlic to burn.
Add the sugar to taste. I used about three heaped teaspoons. The thing here is you now have salt from the fish sauce, bitterness and tartness from the chillies, and heat from the chilli oil. You need enough sugar to balance it all out. I like to let the sugar just come through above the above elements so it's somewhere between, say, Heinz ketchup and a sweet chilli sauce.
Add the prawns, stirfry quickly until nearly cooked.
Dissolve a teaspoon of corn flour in about the same amount of water and add it to the prawns. Quickly stirfry another minute or so to thicken the sauce. (This optional, my theory is that it helps the sauce cling to the prawns, but it's not necessary.)
Done!

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Wonderful!! Thank you.

And I laughed at your characterization of it as a strategy. Strategic prawns :-)

[wongkk.livejournal.com]

Lovely! I'm trying to catch up with a few journals and yours - mix of food and sailing - is looking very enticing.

Chilies can be overdone but you want to know that they are there, don't you? There's no point in a chili that hints politely at its presence, is there? You want it to sing and dance :=) Especially for CNY - you want to do a complete Lion Dance! I don't know how it tasted but the photo looks delicious.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Thanks! It's actually a bit less scary than it looks because it's padded out with capsicum as well as chilli...