Recipe: Spicy Prawn Sambol

I first tasted this delicious dish in a small restaurant in Soho in the late 1980s and was instantly hooked. The big flavours of chilli, coconut and fish sauce mixed with the deep aromatic notes from the lemongrass, galangal and sour tamarind was absolutely wonderful. Many years later I discovered a recipe that created that unique Malay flavour, and I put my own twist on it, adding in bird eye chillies for extra fire. You can leave these out if you fear the heat by the way.

You're going to need a mortar and pestle, and a bit of elbow grease but the results can be stunning.

Ingredients

10-12 Medium size raw prawns
4-5 candlenuts (kemiri nuts) or same quantity of macadamia nuts, crushed
1 clove of garlic, peeled and roughly chopped
1 medium banana shallot, peeled and finely chopped
1 stalk of lemongrass (finely sliced with tough outer leaf removed; white part only (lowest 4-5cm). I normally top and tail my lemongrass too.
1 thumb sized piece of galangal, peeled and chopped roughly
4 incredibly hot red bird eye chillies finely chopped (optional)
4 large mild red chillies finely chopped
Two teaspoon’s worth of palm sugar, crushed
A heaped teaspoonful of Thai shrimp paste (trasi, belacan)
Peanut oil (for frying the spice paste – a couple of tablespoonfuls)
Dried tamarind (a chunk the size of a square of chocolate, broken up)
Chicken stock
Thai Fish sauce
Coconut cream (about a dessertspoon full)
Basmati rice to serve

Method

In a good-sized mortar and pestle, pound the chillies, candlenuts, lemon grass, galangal, Thai shrimp paste and palm sugar together. No need to put a lot of force into it. Simply let the weight of the pestle slowly break down the ingredients. I find it best to chop everything very finely first as it makes the pounding much less hard work.

Once you have a fairly smooth paste, add 1 finely chopped banana shallot and continue pounding until you have as smooth a paste as you can. It does take time but it’s worth it. Promise!
Put the kettle on to boil and soak the nugget of dried tamarind in a couple of tablespoons full of boiling water until it releases all its lovely sourness into the water. Mash with a fork to get more of that flavour out.

Gently heat a pan with a little peanut oil until hot but keep the heat fairly low. Add the paste and fry gently until you get an aromatic smell and the paste darkens a bit (about 5 mins) and starts to caramelise a little. Keep adjusting the heat and stirring occasionally to ensure it doesn’t burn. Add some chicken stock to make a nice thickish sauce and add a generous dash of fish sauce. Add the liquid from the tamarind and a little chunk of coconut cream – about a dessertspoonful. Chuck in your raw prawns that have been peeled but still have a little bit of the tail shell left on them (available from Chinese supermarkets frozen). Cook gently until the coconut melts and prawns are gloriously red, with the sauce coating them lovingly.

Serve over steamed basmati rice. Pick the prawns up by the tail, suck the sauce off and then grab the prawn in your teeth and pull the hard tail piece away. Glorious! Eat the rice with the remainder of the sauce. It’ll blow your cotton socks off!