Gambas al ajillo: prawns in garlic oil

Gambas al ajillo: prawns in garlic oil

Gambas al ajillo y vino dulce del Abuelo is a must whenever you visit Madrid. La casa del Abuelo, Grandpa’s house, there are even several tapas bars in town, choose the closest one and order prawns with garlic. A hot earthenware pot with still-bubbling oil and pink shrimp is brought to you at a standing table.

Shrimp, garlic explodes in an instant, white bread cleans the bowl, drinks vermouth and you can move on. To tell the truth, I don’t even know if there are other dishes here, we never even tried to find out, because the shrimps are so good.

Such a dish is a great hot appetizer for weekend evenings, or one of the starters when you need to feed guests.

Buy good frozen, uncooked shrimp. Fits medium to larger. To produce in the photo langostinas congelados, they are sold thawed by Mercadona and other supermarkets in Tenerife.

In the beginning, I used to ask for thawed shrimp to be weighed from the ice display in the fish section, but when one time, the desired amount was not available and I was simply weighed from the freezer, I realized that aha, they are all frozen. Since then, I just buy a box of a couple of kilos and always have it in the freezer, for those times when you can’t think of anything to cook, or you’re just too lazy to go to the store.

In Lithuania, if there are no thawed, uncooked shrimps in the display window, look for gray, frozen shrimps in store freezers. And by no means buy already cooked, pink ones. Boiled shrimp are not suitable for heat treatment again. Here’s how to reheat the fish. They will just shrink and become hard. Cooked thawed shrimp, if someone has already bought them, use them to make a sandwich like in Denmark (or Sweden), pour them on pureed soup, use them in salads, mix them with mayonnaise, but in no case do not fry or boil them, they are already cooked.

Clean, decapitate, peel. You can leave a tail for beauty if you want, but it is not necessary.

Clean the “guts”. There are two dark bands in the shrimp, the excretory canal at the top, the nerve-brain at the bottom. You can easily remove both of them immediately by turning your head, sometimes they even come off with the head itself. Alternatively, you can make a continuous incision with a knife and pull out the dark thread with your fingers or a pick.

Rinse under running water and dry on a paper towel. If you are cooking with frozen shrimp, make sure they are completely thawed. If you put half-frozen ones in a hot pan, nothing good will happen. The pan will cool down, the shrimp will release water and start to cook. Therefore, the shrimp must be well drained before cooking.

Prepare the garlic. Peel and cut into slices. I advise you not to make it very thin, it is better when the slices are at least a few millimeters thick, they will not fry so quickly.

Heat the pan. In Spain, in almost every grocery store, you can buy earthenware dishes of various diameters, in which it is convenient to fry and serve beautifully not only shrimps but also other hot snacks. If you don’t have such dishes, cook in a frying pan or another thick pan that holds the heat well and won’t cool down as soon as you add the shrimp.

Heat the oil. It should be hot but not smoking. Everything will burn in a pan that is too hot. If it is too cold, the shrimp will release water and start to cook.

Add the well-drained shrimp to the heated oil, when they start to brown, add the garlic and turn the shrimp over.

Flip and cook the other side.

In the photo, the prawns are sufficiently cooked. The inside is still a little gray, but they will cook from their own heat. These can already be removed from the fire and transferred to another container. We use a slightly heated clay pot.

Sprinkle with cayenne pepper, a pinch of salt, or your favorite salt and enjoy while smearing the oil on fresh white bread.

Delicious!