Steamed Garlic Shrimp Chinese Restaurant Style - Marion's Kitchen

Garlicky, juicy, steamed prawns and some extra little tips and tricks for making this dinner party worthy. This is my Chinese Steamed Prawns. This dish always reminds me of special occasions. When I was little, we used to go to this Chinese restaurant that had the most amazing steamed prawns. It always came out in a flourish of steam. Beautiful, straight prawns with a really deep garlicky flavour. I can just picture it now. I love making this dish for my family and friends at home. I hope you like it too. Couple of little tricks here for making it look super special. Let's do the garlic sauce first though. Obviously, a lot of garlic cloves here. If you happen to have watched a lot of Twilight and think that you're a vampire, you should stay away from this dish. It is very garlicky. I just want to pulse this so I get a nice fine chop. That's the kind of thing we're looking for. I don't want a paste here, just a nice chop. I'm going to cook the garlic a little bit. I need some oil. An error on the side of caution here guys. Keep the heat low because I want that garlic to kind of lose some of its edge. But I don't want it to brown and I certainly don't want it to burn. I also want some spring onion here. I want some of the white part first. That green part, I'm going to save for decorating later. I want a really fine slice on these. I'm going to thin out that bulbous end. Then finely slice. That goes in with my garlic. I want a little bit of salt here. That's going to help to draw the moisture out of the garlic and get it nice and soft and sweet. Now just give these aromatics about a minute or so. Now I'm going to add in some extra flavourings. I want some Chinese Shaoxing wine here. This is an optional. It will add a really beautiful flavour. But if you want to keep this alcohol-free, just leave it out. Now some soy sauce. A touch of sugar. This is going to bring out the sweetness in the garlic and the prawns. Just mix that through. Now let me just check this for seasoning. This is going to be the only seasoning that happens on the prawns. So I do want it a little on the salty side. That's good. Salty. The garlic is not raw, so it's not really harsh. It's nice and soft. Great. I'm just going to empty this out into a bowl. Now drizzle in a little bit of sesame oil. Leaving that till the end here will mean we get a really bright sesame flavour. Now for the prawns. I have these really beautiful jumbo tiger prawns today. They're so special. I've taken the heads off. We need to prep the bodies in a certain way. So take some scissors. Cut through the back of that prawn. I want to take out that little gunky bit in the back here. Pull that out. Just run a knife through here. I want to make sure I'm opening up the actual prawn meat inside. But don't cut all the way through. That's what we're looking for. Take a bamboo skewer. Flip your prawn over. Go in from the bottom of the tail. The idea here is to straighten out that prawn as much as possible. Open that prawn up a little bit. Spoon in some of your garlic sauce. Then pop that onto your plate. Now this is going to be your serving plate. So pick one that's nice and pretty. Just keep going. If you own a Chinese restaurant or you're a total food nerd, you probably do have a massive big Chinese steamer. But I know not a lot of you will. So let's get a little crafty about how we steam these prawns. First of all, I've got a wok here. You can use a wide pan as well. Let's see how this plate fits in. Okay, so we can see skewers are way too long. So what we're going to do is just shorten them. Grab some scissors and sort of bend and cut. Alright, now let's have a look. Yes, that's going to fit nicely. Now to turn this into a steaming setup, what you want to do is grab yourself some foil and make a little circular trivet here. Now pop that into your water. It should be just starting to steam. Then your plate rests on top. That plate should be sitting just above the water. Put a lid on. These guys should only take about 8 or 10 minutes, depending on how big they are. You can tell they're cooked when the shells turn a beautiful pink and they're nice and opaque. So while we're waiting for the prawns, let's get a little bit fancy with our spring onion. So take those green tops that we made earlier and cut through them. Then make some really fine slits in each of those little slivers of spring onion. Then pop that into some cold water and they will magically curl up. The kitchen is officially smelling amazing. Let's take a look. Check out how magical those prawns look. That beautiful bright orange colour. So festive. Carefully lift that plate out. Of course, we've got our fancy curly spring onion. There you go guys. Whether you are making dinner to impress, wanting to celebrate a special occasion, or you just love garlic prawns, this is the dish for you. 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