Sun Dried Pasta with Prawns
And I’m going with to garnish my pasta today with this shrimp and get a nice big shrimp on sale today so with that I just have big, nice shrimp.
The first thing I'm going to is I'm going to just put the shells in the pan. Leaving the tail on just because it looks pretty as a little extra flaring color to the shrimp and it makes bigger too.
The reason I’m keeping the shells is there is also some really good flavor in the shells so it’s extra simple flavor, and if you’ve ever had the amaebi at a Japanese Restaurant where they deep fry the heads and the flavor of the heads is just so intense because of the shells is also full of calcium that’s good for you.
Turn this on. To get the flavor out, I’m going to use a little bit of white wine and then we’ll leave a little bit of the white wine residue because I need something to carry the flavor of the shrimp and then we’ll season our shrimp and then the pasta it should be right in there too.
One thing about making sure if your pasta is done and through the noodle on the wall, that’s the way to cool it down. And if it’s cooked when it’s cold, and it’s just a little too al dente. And when it comes right out of the hot water, the molecules are moving so fast. They could seem like it actually is cooked all the way through but by the time it gets in your plate it cools down a little bit. It’s like almost too raw, too al dente. We’ve got about two minutes more.
I've got all my shells in there and just some white wine in there. And we have also some alcohol on there. And then I'm not going to get much of a flambé out of white wine because this had enough colors too much a little bit. What a shrimp be without garlic and I used the back side of my knife to almost like a garlic’s measure and can’t catch your finger this way. Just dice there and break in there.
And I use a little paprika. I like the color and if we sauté it at a high enough heat it also get the flavor and so melted in to the shrimp. You can marinate this a little bit earlier. If you want, you don’t have to put any type of marinade on the fish or shrimp for too long especially if it has got sugar or salt in it because the sugar and the salt suck all the juice out of meat. That’s how we put the things like flax. That’s a good example. Flax is cooked by using sugar and salt. It does it chemically and it pulls all the moisture out of the meat. If you marinate it too long, it’s just going to dry it out.
Marinates were originally done to preserve things. Now, we just use it for flavor. It’s just a luxury. I’ll do refrigeration. You can probably smell the shrimp now and then I just cook the shells. I totally cool it off. I'm just going to cool it enough to stop it from cooking.
And that’s about the point where if you can keep your hand in there that’s cooled it off enough and if you can't keep your hand on there, it’s still cooking probably. I’ll turn this off now and in this pot, I’m going to get my cream going and I'm going to have to some more garlic of course. If I add the sun dried tomatoes, I’ll add this as well but now I may have little topping. So you’ll just have a little second.
As long as you cook the garlic, probably it doesn’t matter if you have a couple of big chunks in there. It’s not going to be hot like you would in a Caesar salad where you have it raw. And what we want to do with the cream is reduce it enough and thicken it up so that when you put it on the pasta it sticks to the pasta. I guess portabello mushrooms and portabello all seem to take a bit longer to cook for they really have that good mushroom texture.
Mushrooms have a lot of moisture in them but there was seem to be moisture to get moisture to come out so it’s a good idea so our cream is looking good. I'm going to show you some of the back of the spoon to give you an idea how your sauce is doing. Sort of, it caught the spoon. It almost looks right but we’re going to go and thicken that. You also see it’s a little watery now and it will thicken it up as we keep reducing it. When we talked about reducing, we’re talking about taking the moisture, the water content out of something leaving that with the flavor or in this case the butter fat.
And we’ll put a little more white wine there as well. If you have any leftover of wine from a party, red or white, and you’re not going to drink it because it’s been over for a couple of days. Put it in the fridge the way you want to turn the vinegar so you have a recipe that you want to put some wine in, you can just grab your leftover wine on the fridge. And if you have a couple of bottles, just add it back. Now we’ll get that cream. It’s been pretty thick but I still want a little bit thicker than this.
Now, if I’ll put the pasta now. The pasta has got a lot of starch on it so that also is going to help to thicken the sauce and can we ask for sun dried tomatoes that I didn’t burn or chop in the front. The sun dried tomatoes, the reason why I like to use it so much is they really don’t need the farm so they can stay on the vine longer and mature and become nice and sweet. So they have a lot more tomato flavor and so your rubber store but tomato does and also to give the sauce a sort of pink color so it would be a little bit different and also some regular old cream sauce.
If you have a hand wonder you could really make this your really make this very, very simple looking but as long as they are pink up That’s a kind of pasta is ready that should be good and I got some basil here. We’re going to put that at the end but I’ll go ahead and cut that now. If you put it in too early it’s going to get dark on you like they have a green look in there so a couple of nice of leaves for garnish at the end.
I've been playing around with the basil or the variations we used. It has kind of red tinge to it and this has about five times more strength so it’s a really good stuff if you have a view over it at mark at 99 or whatever.
Pull the big stems out so wind these guys up, a classical French which is call as chiffonade. And if also you don’t want to catch your basil too soon either because it will oxidize and you want them fresh and green. And I’m going to add my artichokes to the cream. It’s getting just for about where I want it. I’ll put everything with the pasta. Anything I've got available, it goes together. You don’t want to put in something that it really sort of contradictory.
Once you get it nice and cooked and then the shrimp. One thing you’re going to have to make sure with shrimp is you don’t want to cook them too long. Shrimp are they are 3 or 5 minute thing. Any time you go beyond that you’re probably going to end up—either you make them too chewy. I mean we like that chewiness of shrimp but we don’t want rubber and the same thing with boiling them. If you’re boiling your shrimp cocktail after about four minutes, you’re going to have much shrimps on your hands pretty quick.
The sauce is looking good and shrimp got that on high and then you could just as easily throw this shrimp into the sauce in a way of four minutes and serve. But this way, we have a little more control or we’ll have the shrimp come out, and we’ll get some flambé. We’re going to have fireworks.
Chefs only flambéing when people are looking grounds to it. At this point, I could actually if I wanted to put the lid on it and then turn it off. By the time I got the pasta and everything ready, maybe this will be perfect.
Probably you can see it cooking either and you can see they’re almost cooked already. I'm going to turn that off and my sauce is the way I like it. I’ll just add a little salt in there and some white pepper. Generally the rule with the pepper is white pepper in white sauce, black pepper in everything else. Put our salt. And we’ll crank up the heat, certainly heat the pasta. It won’t take long with it. The sauce has been nice and hot. Sauce really cooks all the pasta. It’s really a little bit on the side with the heat in the pan. It will easily cook what little left of have the sauce is there. You see that peppery gather a nice orange color.
Now, it would be a good time for you to put basil in and we’ll turn off the heat. You can just garnish it with the basil but I want a little bit of the flavor that you’ve cooked out. And so in for the center of the plate and just let the pasta follow then the others. We’ll do some things and see how that works. Now in the matter of pans, you put on each plate. It really depends on how much you like to appear.
And you use some fresh Parmesan or some Romano, put our two basil leaves. Get your sprigs also that we get like you have four leaves like that and it always gets nice. And there, a couple of like that and then I put a little bit extra pepper at the top. And there we go!
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