Cooking 101 – Unshelling and Deveining Prawns

This will be the first Cooking 101 Article. Certain recipes will require a skill or process in order to complete the recipe. The first recipe that will be posted will require Prawns. In serving this dish the Prawns would need to be unshelled and deveined first. Certain dishes keep the shell but this particular one requires naked prawns. Deveining for the uninitiated is a process in removing the digestive tract of the Prawn in order to have a cleaner eating experience. This is similar to cleaning fish, removing innards from chickens and pork and the like. Unlike those processes though, this is very simple and would only take you less than 5 minutes.

Tools needed:

Knife – I’m using a Santoku knife, it’s a common knife that is useful for a multitude of kitchen tasks. You may substitute this with any slicing knife you have in your possession.

Kitchen Shears – I would advise any Cooking Bachelor to obtain a pair of Kitchen Shears, these are not expensive and will go a long way in your kitchen activities

Steps:

1. Defrost your prawns if frozen in water and about 2 dashes of salt with a salt shaker. It will not take too long for this to happen. Normally in about 10 minutes it will be in a chilled state and the prawn’s body will be malleable.

2. Using kitchen shears, cut off the appendages of the Prawns. You will need to get the ones under the body, and under the head. I also cut off the whiskers.

3. Chop off the head of the prawns. Be careful in doing this because you do not want the contents of the head to leak out. Inside the head of the prawns is the brains and the “jelly” of the prawns which produces a very strong taste that is normally used in soups and sauces. We will be needing the heads in creating the sauce for the dish we will make.

4. Peel the shell off with your hands. Grab the front end of the shell and pull back. It should then separate from the body of the prawn. Do not peel off the tail end. Now you’re done with peeling.

7. Finally we go to the deveining part. This is slightly trickier, here you would make a small incision along the backside of the prawn down the middle. Afterwards you would then feel around to look for the vein (which is actually the digestive tract) of the prawn and remove it. Once you find it, just pull it out until it separates from the prawn and throw it away.

And there you have it! You have successfully unshelled and deveined the prawns. It’s very simple actually once you get the hang of it. Many recipes will call for this kind of preparation and the next post is an example of such a recipe. I hope this post proves helpful!

- Gerald