Chinese-style Garlic Butter Prawns | Easy Wok Dish | Adam Liaw's Roadtrip For Good

over the next few weeks this youtube channel is going to look a little bit different in late 2019 large parts of australia were affected by devastating bushfires road trip for good is an initiative that helps people to go back to these areas to see them regenerate and recover so along with the recipes that you know and love you'll also be hearing some of the stories of the people who are affected by this tragedy this recipe is a chinese restaurant hot plate special sizzling garlic butter prawns [Music] around the beginning of 2020 bushfires in a pandemic devastated many australian regional towns but they are recovering and rebuilding i'm on the road to visit some of these areas as they spring back to life and collect some of australia's best produce along the way join me on my road trip for good [Music] my road trip brings me to kangaroo island located 13 kilometers off the coast of south australia this is one of the worst bushfire affected areas in the country heading to stokes bay in the north people visit here for the coastline natural beauty and wildlife [Music] it's also home to shane leahy the garlic farmer and volunteer firefighter for the local country fire service kangaroo island is just a wonderful beautiful place there's only four thousand people live on kangaroo island and the support that we've received from each other really is just amazing i started growing garlic on king roland five years ago the climate on kangaroo island lends itself to growing very good flavoured garlic see after harvest for the first six months we have fresh garlic available in the off season when australian garlic isn't available is why i started to develop the dehydrated products we do garlic salt garlic granules garlic powders so people can use australian produce all year round december the 20th we had lightning strikes on kangaroo island for two weeks we fought pretty hard to control those fires the conditions got very extreme the winds and temperatures and on january the third the fire basically got out of control i returned home after firefighting out of cape border on the west end of the island to find that my home had been totally destroyed by the fires pretty devastating initially to see that but it came back to looking into my shed to see that the garlic seed that i'd harvested two weeks earlier was still intact so the forward thinking was at least i could put in a crop this year in my mind it was like this is where life starts again look at all the stuff you got yeah mate what were you after today uh bit everything i think we're putting 10 acres this year which is the biggest galley crop that i've ever grown and at the moment looking very good [Music] all right awesome today thanks very much thanks see ya [Music] bushfires took a lot from shane took his house didn't take everything and this is more than a basket of garlic this is shane's future [Music] i don't know about you but when i was a kid watching one of these babies coming to the table at a chinese restaurant was about as happy as i could get the sizzling hot plate is kind of an icon of the westernized chinese restaurant but if i'm entirely honest with you as an adult i'm not that much of a fan of them quite often things like prawns which are very delicate are served on them and if you're cooking prawns for an extra five ten minutes on a cast iron hot plate they're going to be overcooked so to me they're not ideal but we are going to use one today all the same i'm going to show you a few tricks to get around the the drawbacks of your sizzling hot plate because they are really quite spectacular garlic butter prawns might sound more western than chinese but i want to illustrate some of the differences in kind of how you season a dish in the chinese style rather than the western style we're using prawns obviously garlic obviously and butter but we're going to season this multi-dimensionally so as well as seasoning with salt we're going to add some fish sauce and some chinese wine to give us some extra umami also think about the sweetness of the dish as well so a touch of sugar as well let's get started with the prawns so to prepare the prawns i just want to peel them keeping the heads and shells for stock or oil or something like that but i also want to butterfly them i'll show you how to do that in just a second okay so all these shells can go into a pot of water i was bringing to the boil for some easy prawn stock butterflying is a simple process you just cut through the backbone of the prawn take out the intestine and then the prawn as it cooks will curl outwards and give you this kind of flower shape of the prawn [Music] you often find when you're running your knife down the back of the prawn it will start to take some of the intestine out with it which is making life really easy but you can also see how the shape of these prawns starts to develop so as that cooks you know rather than being a prawn that just curls up that way it'll curl sort of around and out at the same time give you that lovely flower prawn shape [Music] okay so the prawns are butterflied and now it's time to go over them so what's velveting you're probably asking now velveting is an ingenious part of chinese cooking what it is is marinating in a slightly alkaline solution so not acidic basic or alkaline and what that does is it stops proteins from joining together too strongly so when proteins aren't tightening up and joining together too strongly your meat or seafood is going to be more tender there aren't too many alkaline things in the food world but things like egg whites or flour and actually even regular old tap water that has mineral contents that make it a little bit alkaline are really good for this process i'm not going to use egg whites with my prawns because i think actually when you do egg whites and prawns together you can add a bit too much protein in the cooking process it can coagulate a bit too much but i am going to use a bit of corn flour and a bit of regular old mineral rich tap water that's going to give a slightly alkaline solution here and now i just want to massage the corn flour and the water into the prawns now this is a really light example of velveting quite often what you'll see in traditional chinese cooking is the addition of egg white or even massaging the flower solution into the prawns and rinsing under running water for sometimes even hours on end when water is mineral rich in a little bit alkaline that will really tenderize the prawns and also remove a lot you can see this is turning slightly pink here a lot of the the pink or the red coloring from the pawns which gives you those lovely white crystally prawn dishes you often see in chinese cooking i'm not so fussed with that i don't mind a bit of pink in the prawns that i'm cooking here and this is probably good enough for me so i'll just put these to the side for a little bit wash my hands and i'll come back and start making my garlic butter sauce [Music] the sauce obviously starts with this shane's kangaroo island garlic now a really important thing with chinese cooking is you don't want to cut garlic too small for a general stir-fry type dish that's because garlic can burn really really easily so i want to cut this to sort of roughly chopped i guess you'd call it rather than finely minced so that doesn't burn too quickly when we cook it in the butter garlic chopped prawns ready to go it's time to head to the stove for a kind of a a two-step cooking process so the first step is oil blanching oil blanching is something you've probably seen in chinese restaurants before wok full of hot oil ingredients quickly flash fried in there and then removed now for home cooking i don't think that's the easiest way of doing it you know it takes a bit of skill to manage a whole wok of hot oil transferring oil in and out of it so i use a separate cooking vessel like this deep frying pan here i'm just going to quickly cook the prawns and remove them before we stir fry them [Music] [Music] before the prawns go in i want to get my sizzling plate up to temperature and i've just rubbed it with a bit of oil it's cast iron so i want to heat it up nice and early straight onto the heat now it's wok time because we're using butter this is a slightly different recipe woks often are really tossed over high heat but butter will burn in a wok at a high cooking temperature so at a relatively low temperature i just want to heat the butter and kind of infuse the garlic into it i don't want to brown the garlic too much this frying really does release the aroma of the garlic but you don't want to brown it too much for this dish sometimes you want that toasty garlic but for this you want it to be still relatively blonde now is where it kind of departs into a more asian style sauce i'm going to add some stock our prawn stock seasonings shouting wine fish sauce and a touch of sugar as well [Music] just give that a taste to make sure it's seasoned correctly because i don't want the prawns to keep cooking too much on the sizzling plate i'm going to add some sliced raw onion onto the plate that's going to keep the prawns actually up off the metal so they don't overcook i'll add the prawns into the garlic butter sauce toss it together and i want to create an emulsion now to finish this so a bit of cornstarch and water to thicken the sauce and i can go straight on the sizzling hot plate [Music] sizzling garlic butter prawns [Music] you

Channel: Adam Liaw

Views: 105,563

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Id: 5W3uG8FHdw0

Length: 12min 19sec (739 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 08 2020