Prawn Recipe Guardian

Thomasina Miers’ pea, chilli and prawn casarecce with rocket. Photograph: Yuki Sugiura/Photograph and prop styling: Yuki Sugiura for the Guardian. Food stylist: Sunil Vijayakar

Whether you’re preparing a starter for guests, a hearty dinner for yourself or burgers for hungry kids, here are the prawn recipes you need

F ew foods seem to polarise people like prawns. To some, they’re a genuine delicacy. To others, they’re a step too close to the world of insect consumption. If you’re reading this, though, you’re clearly part of the former crew. Here are 10 prawn-heavy recipes for you to enjoy.

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We’ll start with Felicity Cloake’s perfect gambas al ajillo. Once you have assembled the ingredients, this oily, garlicky tapas dish comes together in no time at all. Don’t forget to have some bread to hand to mop up all the delicious juices. Interesting side note: Cloake enjoys slurping the goo out of the prawns’ heads, too.

Gambas al ajillo isn’t really a main dish, so if you’re ravenous, perhaps you’d do better with Thomasina Miers’ recipe for pea, chilli and prawn casarecce with rocket. You start with cooked prawns, heat them in garlic and chilli, then toss them in pasta. You can be as heavy handed with the chilli as you like, too, depending on taste. If you have kids, then this recipe is a good place to start.

One good thing about prawns is that they are robust enough to take a lot of heat, which makes them ideal curry candidates. Earlier this year, Selina Periampillai shared her recipe for seychellois cari koko, a tamarind and coconut curry that suits prawns a lot better than generic brown curry sauce. What’s great about this is that the spice mix uses spices you probably already have, and in enough quantities for you to store for a later date.

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Yotam Ottolenghi’s prawn and corn taquitos. Photograph: Louise Hagger/The Guardian. Food styling: Emily Kydd. Prop styling: Jennifer Kay. Food styling assistant: Susanna Unsworth.

Taquitos are always exciting, and Yotam Ottolenghi’s version – filled with prawn and corn – are especially good and particularly unfussy. Get some tortillas. Fill them with a mix of prawn, corn, tomato and spices. Wrap them up, bake them and eat them. Slightly disappointing that Yottam didn’t go for the rhyming trifecta (tell me you wouldn’t eat a prawn, corn and lawn taquito), but let’s not be too picky.

If a country has a coastline, there’s a good chance it has its own prawn dishes. Lara Lee has a prawn recipe inspired by hot and sour Vietnamese

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Dipping sauces, for example. She marinades the prawns in garlic, ginger and fish sauce, then stir-fries them and some vegetables quickly, and serves it all with noodles.

Actually, let’s linger in Vietnam for a while, because the Vietnamese seem to know exactly what to do with prawns. Wok and Kin has a recipe for Tôm Rim – caramelised prawns – that might just be enough to convert even the staunchest prawn sceptic. The prawns are marinated overnight, then fried with sugar to make a thick dark sauce. They’re best with shells on, but you can make this just as easily with de-shelled prawns or smaller prawns (or simply swap them for pork belly). Either way, one to try.

I picked most of these recipes because they’re relatively uncomplicated to make. And then there is Francesco Sposito’s recipe for fried puff of squid ink stuffed with burrata, raw prawn, mandarin and tarragon oil. The squid ink choux requires six hours of resting and I lack the technique to prepare any of the elements. My children would sweep the plate to the floor in a rage if I ever gave them this for their tea. Still, though, it does look quite nice.

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Maybe I’d do better with a prawn burger. Big Green Egg has a recipe that has blended prawn, egg, tomato and spices formed into patties, then served with spicy vegetable pickle. Your kids might still sweep the pickle to the floor in a rage, but at least you tried.

Now I think about it, we’ve mainly concentrated on spice so far. Let’s remedy that with a visit to Scandinavia, and Olive’s recipe for Skagen toast. This is the prawn as comfort food: cooked, mixed with onion, smothered in mayonnaise and plonked on to some toast. It’s more elegant than I’ve made it sound, and should probably be your first port of call when you’re tired of cooking everything in chilli.

As is tradition, we’ll end with a cocktail – a prawn cocktail, that is. And, in a rare double-Cloake, we’ll use her perfect prawn cocktail recipe from 2014. She uses a mix of shell-on prawns and brown shrimp, if you’re interested, although there’s no word about head-slurping here, so use your discretion.Shells on or off? Spicy or sour? How you like your garlic prawns is very personal – but that isn’t going to stop our resident perfectionist from assembling her ideal version

Prawns With Sticky Rice And Papaya Pickle

T he Spanish are some of Europe’s most enthusiastic consumers of fish and seafood, putting away an impressive 46kg per person per year – as Barcelona-born chef Frank Camorra observes, “Judging by the number of shells on tapas bar floors, I reckon that figure is mainly made up of prawns”. Sizzling earthenware dishes of garlicky gambas are a mainstay of the tapa repertoire, served swimming in aromatic oil to be sucked from the shells with a satisfyingly slurp, then mopped up with crusts of bread – perfect summer finger food with a few cold beers, or a chilled glass of bone-dry sherry. Happily, it’s also one of the simplest tapas to make, so if you can’t make it to Spain this year, you can at least taste the place at home.

Few recipes are specific about the type of prawns required, but they need to be both raw and, in most cases, shell on, so in practice this means king prawns, because I’m yet to find a source of raw cold water prawns, despite their arguably superior flavour. Sam and Eddie Hart use larger tiger prawns in their book Modern Spanish Cooking, while José Pizarro suggests vivid red carabineros in one video – both can be substituted for king prawns in the recipe below, though you’ll need to increase the cooking time slightly.

The Harts, Floyd on Spain and Camorra’s book Movida leave the prawns whole, Pizarro removes the shells but leaves the heads and tails on, while Elisabeth Luard shells them completely in her book Tapas, as does J Kenji López-Alt on Serious Eats. I’m torn; I enjoy the process of peeling the prawns and, yes, sucking out all the lovely goo from the heads, but it can’t be denied that most of the flavour of the garlic oil ends up on discarded shells rather than the meat, so Pizarro’s approach seems the most sensible, unless you, like me, will happily lick them clean, too.

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López-Alt, however, reckons that “throw out the shell and you’re missing out”, pointing out that they “pack a sweet, flavourful punch” that’s perfect for infusing the cooking oil alongside more usual ingredients. In his recipe, I peel the prawns, then fry the shells for 10 minutes with garlic and chilli, until I have a terracotta-red, aromatic oil with a nutty, distinctly prawny flavour that reminds me slightly of Sichuan chilli oil with dried shrimp. It’s an extremely good thing with a hunk of bread, and a piece of genius when combined with Barcelona-based chef account Bien de Pimienta’s trick of decanting the contents of the heads into the pan, so their rich, sweet contents don’t go to waste.

López-Alt also marinates the prawn meat briefly in salt, garlic and bicarbonate of soda, explaining that “salt acts like a brine, helping the shrimp retain their juiciness, while baking soda causes the flesh to turn a little crunchy”. Salt aside, none of my testers can tell the difference in a side-by-side comparison with an unmarinated prawn, so I decide to skip this step.

Though you don’t want to overwhelm the delicate crustaceans, this is not a time to be shy with the garlic. Most recipes simply sauté the prawns with chopped or sliced garlic, but both Pizarro and López-Alt take the time to infuse the oil with its flavour before introducing the prawns, with the latter also adding crushed garlic to the marinade, and sliced garlic to the already-flavoured oil in the final stage. I find it all too easy to over-brown the garlic when adding everything all at once, so it seems more sensible to add it in two stages, first smashed, to infuse the oil, then sliced at the end, so it cooks without crossing the line into bitterness.

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Camorra brushes his prawns with a vivid, green garlic and parsley oil, which is the perfect choice if you choose to barbecue your prawns, while if you’d prefer a dish you can serve cold, consider making a simple alioli, or garlic mayonnaise, as in the Hart brothers recipe.

Chilli is a common addition; Pizarro uses the fresh kind in one of his videos, but we agree that dried chilli gives