Grilled Garlic Butter King Prawns Recipe

This is a dish that can be elegant if presentation is done right that it will impress your family and guests. Sometimes when you plan to cook a few dishes yet you have only 2 stoves and 1 oven, this will be one of the easiest recipe to pop in the oven, when the oven beeps, plate and serve immediately.


Recipe for 1-2

Ingredients
8 King Prawns
6 cloves of Garlic (minced finely)
2 tablespoons of Butter (approx 30g)
1 teaspoon of Italian Herbs (or any Herbs)


1. Prepare the prawns, our tips below.
2. Lightly rinse, pat dry, and arrange the prawns.
3. Pre-heat oven to 250°C.
4. Mix Garlic, Butter, Italian Herbs well.
5. Fill each prawns with about half a teaspoon of Garlic Butter Mix.
6. Grill in the oven for approx 15mins.
7. Plate the prawns and serve hot.

Enjoy~

Lesson Learnt & Tips:
- These prawns can be prepared few hours before meal time, cover with kitchen wrap and store in fridge.
- Fresh Prawns shelf life in a refrigerator is 1-2 Days. For longer shelf life of 6-8 Months store in a Freezer. More info here.
- How to prepare the prawns? For ours we are keeping the head, shell, legs and tail on for presentation. To devein the prawn, use a kitchen scissor to cut the shell along the middle of the back. Then use a knife to make a long slit along the middle of the back to expose the dark vein. Pull out the vein. To have the butterfly prawn effect, give a deep cut along the back, open it out and press it down so that it's flat. Turn the prawns over and slit in between of all the prawns leg so it won't curl up during the grilling process.


Click here for our blog page Cooking Classes for more recipes. Hope you will be inspired~

In search of the Perfect Steak™ - Semi Frozen Steak Method.

The darling and I are big steak lovers. Or perhaps more accurately, I'm the big steak lover, and she has to come along for the ride. We've come a long way since our first home-cooked steak blogpost three years ago - progressing from el-cheapo grill pan to Sous Vide - and now we've tried what might be our favorite method thus far, courtesy of Modernist Cuisine: The Frozen Steak!


So medium rare. Much juicy. Yums!
The traditional way of cooking a steak has huge drawbacks. In order to get a nice crust you have to cook fast and hot. But because steak cooks from the outside in, by the time the middle is at your preferred temperature, the outer layers have become a grey shade of dry, well done meat.


Image courtesy of Colin McNulty
The solution, then ... is to freeze your steak before searing. Start off with a good piece of meat - like this beautiful $76.90/kg Wagyu Striploin - and plop it uncovered in the freezer on some parchment paper for about 30 minutes. You can see in the photo below that we used kitchen towels: Not a good idea as the steak's juices may saturate the towel and make it hard to remove.


From there just use your favorite searing method to get the maillard reaction going. Blowtorch'ing is the most convenient and fuss-free method but we still prefer oil in a smoking hot skillet. You'll note that we've used quite a lot of oil - this allows a greater surface area of the steak to get scorched by the oil since it's hard and may not conform to the flat pan all that well.


Once both sides are seared nicely we stuff a probe in the middle of the meat and bake in the oven at 70°C, at our chosen target temperature of 55°C (sort of in between Rare and Medium Rare). You can decide what temperature you want, of course! Rare starts at about 52°C, and Medium Well is at about 65°C. Any higher and honestly you might as well not bother eating steak.


Now the huge drawback for this method is controlling the cooking time. it takes anywhere from 30-50 minutes to reach a 55°C internal temperature, which is fine if your diners aren't fussy about waiting. But if you've got a hungry couple waiting at the dinner table and the thermo only reads 45°C ... well you get the idea :)


That yellow froth is milk solids from the melted butter
Now that your steak's ready you can garnish, season and serve - no resting necessary! For today we just melted a little butter and poured it over the top, with some salt and pepper to taste. Re-visiting this cross-section photo we can see there is a very minimal grey band of well done meat - 90% or more of the steak is perfect and just the way we like it. Juicy, tender, delicious!


So there you have our new favorite steak cooking method. We prefer this over sous vide because with a very cold steak you can actually put more heat on the sear to get a proper crust without worrying about the insides overcooking. We've also felt (subjectively) in the past that sometimes sous vide steaks turned out dry - which other blogger home chefs are noticing as well. Having said that, if we were planning a dinner party we would still go with sous vide because of the huge time window for serving the steaks to the guests.

Bon Appétit!

Grilled Honey Thai Chilli Sauce Chicken Drumlets/Winglets Recipe

Lovely quick and easy oven grill recipe. Definately a keeper for homecook or marination for outdoor BBQ party!


Ingredients
18 Drumlets/Winglets
70ml Light Soy Sauce
2 tablespoons Honey
2 tablespoons Ground Ginger Powder
1 tablespoons Ground Garlic Powder
4 tablespoons Thai Chilli Sauce
2 tablespoons Hua Diao Jiu (Chinese Cooking Wine)

1. Wash and pat dry chicken Drumlets / Winglets.
2. Combine the rest of the marination ingredients.
3. Pour over and combine well, let it marinate for at least 30mins on the table top or overnight in the fridge.
4. Preheat over at 200°C. Spray baking pan.
5. Arrange Drumlets / Winglets top the extra 4-5 tablespoons of marination sauce.
6. Grill each side for 10mins. Approx flip 3 times, which is 30mins and it'll be cooked through.
7. Remove from oven and serve.


Enjoy~!!!

Click here for our blog page Cooking Classes for more recipes. Hope you will be inspired~

Chef at Home: Delicious Miso Crusted Salmon Fillets

If you've been following us, you'll know that we cooked up a kick-ass 5-course dinner for my mum to celebrate Mother's Day. One of the main courses was the Miso Crusted Salmon, so today we'll be giving you the full recipe so you can cook it too!

The recipe we got this from initially called for Cod. Sadly we couldn't find any non-frozen cod fish, so we went for salmon instead, and it actually turned out very well!

Ingredients:
- Salmon Fillets
- Mirin (Japanese sweet rice wine used for cooking, we bought ours at a 100Yen shop)
- Sugar
- Miso


You'll notice from the pic above that since we couldn't find plain miso-in-a-container, and since time was running short, we improvised and bought a pack of instant miso soup instead. It serves the same purpose, just remember to discard (or keep for another day) the tofu and seaweed that comes in the pack.

Anyways, bring 100ml of mirin to a boil, then lower the heat to simmer. Stir in 200g of miso paste - once that's dissolved stir in 100g of sugar until that's dissolved, then take off the heat. Let the mixture cool to room temperature.


Wash your salmon fillets and remove any scales/bones that the fishmonger might have missed out, and slather generously in the sugar-mirin-miso concoction.


As you can see below, we've used a funky individual plastic-bag wrap for each fillet, but that was because we sort of didn't notice that we'd run out of plastic cling wrap. You can use whatever you fancy - spoon/pour any leftover sugar-mirin-miso into the plastic and then marinate the fish in the fridge for at least half a day (preferably overnight or up to 2 days).


When it's time to cook, take the salmon fillets out of the fridge. Use your fingers to wipe off any excess sugar-mirin-miso mixture off the fish, but do not rinse. Toss the fillets into a hot frying pan for a minute or two on each side (just enough to sear the miso to give the fish a slight crust, then bake in a pre-heated oven at 200 deg C for about 10 minutes.

That's it! Easy and quick. Trust us when we say this fish is delicious. The mirin and the miso marinade imparts a hint of sweetness to the salmon, and the sear before bake ensures that the fish retains a ton of juice. The resulting fillet has a slightly firm/crusty surface, but is just juicy all over inside.


So go ahead and try it for yourself! Preparation and cooking time are 10-15 minutes each, and you can prep in the morning before work, toss the salmon into the fridge, then come back home and it'll be ready for you to sear/bake and eat a delicious restaurant-quality salmon fillet.

(Unfortunately, mirin contains alcohol, so not strictly halal. Alcohol burns off during the cooking process though.)

Click here for our blog page Cooking Classes for more recipes. Hope you will be inspired~