This Crispy Prawn Noodle Dish Is Unreal

This week I'm doing a ginger and spring onion prawn dish which I've done on Ready Steady Cook. I'm going to serve it on a crispy bowl of noodles. I'm just soaking my noodles in hot water and you can see that they've sort of all lost their packet shape already. It's taken me a sort of four or five minutes to soak these egg noodles. I'm going to strain these and then cool them with some running cold water and then pop them straight onto a clean tea towel Just spread those noodles out if there's any clumps of noodles just get rid of those. You want these to be bone dry before you use them especially if you're going to try and create this sort of like bowl shape when we fry them. Leave them out air dry 10-15 minutes. So the dish itself very very easy and it's a combination of a few different sort of techniques that you might have seen from some of the other videos. It's ginger and spring onion prawns so I'm going to start with my ginger and my spring onion. Peel your ginger, slice your ginger and then plenty of spring onion as well. We'll take some spring onion for the garnish and just nice fine matchsticks of spring onion and then the rest can just chop up in chunks and that's going to go into the wok at the beginning along with the ginger. My ginger and spring onion at 12 o'clock on my wok clock I'm really going to fry that through to get as much flavour off and both as possible. Garnish at the end and then the only other thing to prepare is the prawns themselves. You could just keep them whole. I'm going to butterfly them because they'll look prettier and they'll just be easier to grab the meat out. So straight across, press down and you'll see the vein there you can just take out with the tip of your knife. Give them a little score across the side and then repeat with all your prawns. Now on Ready Steady Cook I use langoustines for this but prawns works an absolute treat as well. Maybe slightly easier to find fresh prawns. So my prawns are all butterflied. I'm just going to give them a quick wash, a bit of cold water and then we'll season them up and then we'll cook the dish up. I'm going to cover with a little bit of corn flour. I don't want the corn flour to be sort of too dry and sort of battery but a pinch of salt and pepper will help too and then just mix that corn flour around. You just want sort of a creaminess around each prawn and try and open up the meat as well so they don't come out sort of crispy like a sweet and sour. They should just come out sort of with a bit more golden brown around the edge of the meat to make sure the meat has got that creaminess from the corn flour. So the prawns are seasoned. I'm just going to mix some sauces together so it's nice and quick. I've got some oyster sauce, a couple of tablespoons and then a tablespoon of light soy. Don't want it too salty. Oyster sauce is already quite salty and savoury. A pinch of sugar, about half a teaspoon something like that and then I've got some rice wine which is optional. I'm just going to pour some of it into here into the sauce. I want that to caramelise around the sort of ginger spring onion flavour first and if I feel like I need a bit more rice wine I'll use it. I've got chicken stock again. I'll use this when we're ready to stir fry. Now my noodles have been drying for about 10 minutes. They're not completely bone dry yet but you can just sort of gently press into them, dry them out a little bit more. We're going to try and make a nice sort of noodle bowl out of these and the way we do that is we've got these spiders I like to call them. They're kind of like spider's webs but a bamboo skimmer essentially or slotted spoon. Of course you can buy them this size from our School of Wok website www.schoolofwok.co.uk. So you want to lay your noodles into sort of nest in your slotted spoon or School of Wok bamboo spatula. So once you've got that you don't want it too thick but you do want them to kind of stick together a little so that when it comes out it comes out in a sort of bowl shape and then I've got my other spider's web here and so when I'm frying it I'll just press down like so and that should create a nice bowl of crispy noodles. Initially you want your oil to be nice and hot so 180 wooden chopsticks or any sort of wooden skewer. If it starts fizzing up like this then you know it's at 180 degrees C. You don't want your oil smoking hot and as I say I'm going to pop this nest in with this tight on top and I'm going to press down on the noodles as they bubble up. Just go careful whilst you're doing this of course you are dealing with really hot oil as you can see. I want my noodles to hold their shape so I want them to go nice and crispy golden brown and the bubbles become less vigorous as well as the noodles are getting crispy and crispier because the water or the moisture from the noodles is all coming out. Now your noodles after sort of a couple of minutes will become super crispy and we know that even before we take it out of the oil because I've barely got any sizzling sound or like sort of big bubbles coming out of the noodles at all. That means that all that moisture has definitely been drawn out and you can see now when I lift it out nice and golden brown not overcooked just super crispy. Pop that onto some tea towels or kitchen towels just to drain through and then we can finish off the prawn dish which all happens really quickly. So whilst your oil is still nice and hot your prawns can get fried in to that oil as well so this is an initial deep fry and they should only take a sort of one to two minutes to fry up. Go careful with this remember it's not a dry batter this so it will react a little when you put the prawns in. You don't want to overcook these prawns just straight out of that oil and on that high heat they cook through very very quickly so from here it's just a toss through in the ginger and spring onion sauce that we need really. This is really really classic Chinese cooking this. So we're going to finish this dish off now. First off with your ginger. I want my ginger to get nice and sort of almost crisp golden brown really bringing that flavour into the oil. You can see I've got a huge amount of ginger in there all nicely sliced up. Spring onion. And I'm going to build up some heat now before I add my prawns then my sauce a little bit of stock then let that bubble through and the cornflour that small bit of cornflour that's gone around the prawns should sip into the sauce and sort of thicken up well not really thicken the sauce but give it that silky texture. So I want to build up that heat don't move the wok around too much at this point. Once your wok is smoking hot all the way around then you're going to pour your sauce in. So now that that wok is nice and hot sauce goes in over the top allow it to vigorously boil don't move your wok around too much and then just fold those prawns into the sauce so that this caramelizes around. Remember that pinch of sugar should help that out. Bring that to a vigorous boil again and then add a little bit of stock. Stock goes in around the edge. Now if you want to speed up the sort of steaming process and the thickening of that sauce then just pop a wok lid on there again you can find this on the School of Wok website www.schoolofwok.co.uk Anyway pop it on a minute or so it'll thicken up and then we're ready. So after a minute your sauce should have a good texture to it. It's actually taking some of that colour in from those beautiful prawns. Switch that off and I've got my nest of noodles here. Just go carefully with this keep it in its nice bowl shape and then serve your prawns over the top. Oh look at these guys. Sauce over the top of that. Spring onion to add to the mountain. Ginger and spring onion prawns Crispy bolognese noodles. See how easily the meat comes off the skin there. Cooking the ginger like that really really makes a difference to the flavour of the sauce. I'm going to show you how crispy this is. Deep savoury, proper Asian flavour, messy eating, not that messy cooking.