How To Make A Prawn Toastie By Jamie Oliver

A prawn toast toasty, yes. It's basically a mash-up between a toasty that we all love in my house and those beautiful prawn toasts that you get in a Chinese restaurant, right. And I've kind of adapted it, done my version and you can do it in one pan and my kids go mad for it. They love prawns at the moment and it's just good to have fun with things you love in restaurants and try and find ways to get them to work at home. So let me show you, we've got some lovely uncooked prawns. I've got an egg, ginger, spring onions, some chilli dipping sauce, bit of soy sauce. Bob's your uncle, a little bit of creativity and let's do this. I've got a loaf of bread, get a serrated knife and I like to use white bread because it's just very simple and spongy. Feel free to use a good soft wholemeal loaf. So slice it about a centimetre thick, so I want four slices and I'm just going to lay it out like that. Now the first job is to create the filling, so the filling is super simple. Take yourself two spring onions, just trim the ends off and then just finely slice it. Super rustic, that's going to give it a crunch and a nice kind of fragrance. Then we're going to go in with some ginger, so just like a little two centimetre piece, just peel off the outside like that. I keep these trimmings by the way, just dry them and they're wicked for making lovely cups of tea or you can put them in broths and make lovely noodle broths and stuff. Slice it up, you can grate it if you want and just run your knife through it so it's nice and fine. So fresh ginger, really good friends with the old spring onion. Then in with the prawns, these are raw, about 160 grams. What I look for is just nice sustainable prawns, you can get the small ones, the big ones, just pull four nice prawns aside and I'll show you what to do with those later and what we're going to do with this is just slice it all up, any old how, it doesn't matter and then bring it in to the ginger and the spring onions and chop it all together. So they kind of become one and then I'm going to make this amazing toasty. Now look, in a restaurant they'd often deep fry these little bad boys, we're going to do it in a pan so it's going to have good crisp, it's going to be a little bit healthier. I want to taste the sweetness and the kind of taste of the sea from the prawns right, so I don't want to overwhelm it with big flavours. I'm going to crack one egg and put the egg whites into this bowl and that's going to give us that amazing outside coating for the bread to make it stick to the sesame seeds, so you get that crunch and so it's really, really golden and crisp and then the yolk will go in the middle here and just make the whole thing bind together. The only thing I want to do now is just lightly season it with some soya sauce, just a splash, about a teaspoon in there is lovely. Look at that, that's all you have to do for the filling, super simple. Now if you want to you can spike this with some herbs, just a little bit of coriander in here will be lovely and again just chop it through and if you want to use mint or even different herbs, feel free to experiment and try. So look, next bit could not be easier, take the bread and we're going to fill it, so take half of that mix, put it onto the bread. In the restaurants often they'll put it on the toast and the difference for us is we're putting it in the toast to make it a toasty. In we go with the stuffing, really load it up, look at that. Be nice and generous. Okay so that's good to go, then place this part on top as you would any other toasty right, but this is going to be a toasty with a difference because now we've done that, we're going to go into the egg white. So get a fork and just beat up your egg whites so they're nice and loose like that and then get your bread, pop it one side on the egg whites, two sides on the egg whites and almost like a french toast, this becomes a layer, it sucks into the bread and then get your sesame seeds and we're going to cover it so it all sticks to it. One side, press it down, other side, look at that, come on. Excited yet? Press it down and that'll make the sesame seeds stick to the bread and when we toast that it'll go golden crispy and delicious. Let me just wash my hands, time to get the pan on. I want to cook this on a medium heat, if it's too hot it'll go black or golden too quickly, we want to cook and kind of steam the inside of that prawn filling. I'm going to use a large non-stick pan and then I want to kind of posh it up a little bit, so I'm going to take a little knife, take that little prawn and simply cut it in half and what I want to do is push this in to the actual bread so the bread and the prawn become one. Oh yes, we're taking a toasty to another level. So last prawn in half, on top like this, a little bit of oil on top and pat those lovely prawns, look at that and then straight in to our pan, just like that, super simple. You can hear it frying already and let that do its work, about three minutes on each side until golden crisp and delicious. Okay let me wash my hands. So bouncing off that I want something kind of cold and fresh, so let me show you how to make the most beautiful quick cucumber pickle. I used to do these when I worked in Japan and you'd have them with beers and things like that, they're really, really good. This is the kind of thing that I love having with things that are hot and a little bit spicy, it's going to be crunchy and zingy. Season this generously with salt, a lot of this salt will go away but just bear with me on that and I'm going to sweep all of this into here and we'll massage these cucumbers with the salt. Starts to change the cucumber, it really starts to pull out the excess moisture from within and it makes it more flexible and also open to flavour. So I'll hit it up with just a little bit of chilli. So a little chilli goes in there and then lime, just give it a nice little roll to get the juices going and squeeze that in. So tangy, crunchy, salty and a little bit of spice. So mix that up and the salt and the acid starts to change the cucumber and now let's check this beautiful prawn toasty, get under there, have a flick. Golden and crisp, that's what we like. So press it down again, look how crispy that is. So literally within one or two minutes, right, can you see how the water has come out of this right, so we can literally pour that water away and we can get that pickle right in our hand and just kind of slowly scrunch it and squeeze out even more water. So that's where most of your salt's going to go and then get a little plate and we just do a little pickle. That, like that's how it used to look in Japan. You can do it with carrots, fennel, anything crunchy, radish, mooli and it's just a really quick, immediate little pickle and the idea is you just take a bit of that, have a cold beer. So that that's fresh and zingy and crunchy with this, which is kind of rich right, prawns are kind of, they feel quite substantial when you have them. So look that side has had three minutes, I'm just going to go on the prawn side just for one more minute to get it really perfectly golden and then I'll serve it and I'll tell you one thing, at the moment because they're all into their prawns, if there's a whiff of these they'll all come running, that's for sure. Come in kids, I've got prawns! Pops, I've got your favourite, get over here. It's actually like unbelievable timing. Do you know the prawn toasties you get in the Chinese restaurants? So look what I do is just slice it up like that and then we've got dipping sauce, I've got some nice little pickles. So my lovely wife, take that over there without dropping it. Pops, you've got pickles and you've got crackers. See that's what happens in family isn't it, you make a load of food and it disappears. Let's get amongst it. Oh god I love it.