“One of the important Chinese festive seafood dishes. It helps to spread laughter around!”
Chinese Lunar New Year, we (Chinese) emphasize on cooking symbolic dishes with auspicious dish name. Prawn, or called it shrimp, is one of the compulsory items to be used to cook CNY dishes as shrimp, in Cantonese, is pronounced as HA (虾). Its pronunciation resembling the sound of laughter, ha ha! It represents happy life with lots of laughter ahead. Do you also notice? Even the curvy shape of each shrimp resembles smiley lips. So, eating shrimps are symbolical during Chinese festive, especially to the Cantonese dialect group.
Moreover, the shrimps in my recipe were cooked till golden appearance. Gold = wealth, it is not difficult to decipher its auspicious definition here, isn’t it (smile)?
Ingredients
400 – 500 grams of medium shrimps (with shell), trimmed
3 – 4 pieces of salted duck egg yolk, almost-cooked and crushed
1 tablespoon of butter (light or unsalted, is fine)
Pinch of salt
1 clove of garlic, minced (*Optional)
Seasoning:
Pinch of salt
½ cup corn starch (for coating)
1 cup of cooking oil (for deep frying)
Method
1) Trim, and also devein the shrimps, if you wished. Simply cut a slit at the back of the shrimp (with shell intact). Otherwise, remain whole complete shrimp as it is. Wash and drain. Season with pinch of salt.
2) Briefly crush the almost-cooked salted egg yolk, and set aside.
3) Heat wok with oil over high heat. Coat each shrimps with corn starch, and deep fry in hot oil till shrimps just done with light golden in colour. Remove from wok and drain on kitchen towel.
4) Remove excess oil and leave only about 2 tablespoons in the wok, reduce heat to medium fire. Then, add in butter and salted egg yolk. Use spatula to crush and stir-fry the yolk immediately, for about 20 seconds or until aroma releases [*Add also minced garlic together with the butter and salted yolk, if you prefer some mild garlical taste in the dish]. Return fried shrimps and add in salt. Toss till well blended. Dish up, and serve with steamed white rice.
This dish is very popular in Asia, and well knownly delicious. It may costs you a few tens dollars to order this seafood dish when dine out. And, it may also look deceptively complicated to prepare or cook. So, you might not even want to try cooking it by your own. However, this superlicious savoury is very simple to cook. It takes less than 20 minutes to get it done, in fact.
Calorie in 1 golden prawn with salted egg yolk counts about 110kcal.
Tips: If you are getting raw salted eggs coated with layers of black soil and dried hay. Remove and wash them till completely clean. The egg shells should now return to its yellowish white in colour. Then, steam the eggs, before separate its white and yolk. Use only the moist yolk. For convenience sake, get those instant ready-to-eat cooked salted egg yolks from supermarkets to save your effort handling the yolks. The texture of these nice readily packed instant yolk is moist enough without worries of over-steaming and become harden and dry. It is more ideal to be used to cook a dish like this one. If can’t find just the packed egg yolk, you may also get the cooked whole salted eggs, and separate its white and yolk at home. You may then keep the white for other dishes.
* May drizzle a little rice wine, or simply water in the wok, if find the ingredients too dry, when half way cooking. Otherwise, add more butter.. It will create even better aroma, but watch out the fat…… :)