The best starter ever? I think so…

Recipe:

Prawn Cocktail

Marie Rose
3 egg yolks
30g Dijon mustard
10g Maldon salt
3 tbsp Worcester sauce
10/12 drops tabasco

10g dry sherry
10g cognac
5g vodka
100g ketchup
Black pepper to taste

500ml vegetable oil

Whisk the egg yolks, Dijon mustard, tabasco, Worcester sauce, salt and black pepper together in a medium sized bowl. Slowly emulsify in the vegetable oil while whisking constantly to form a mayonnaise. Once the mayonnaise has thickened, whisk in the dry sherry, cognac, vodka. Correct the seasoning if needed with more salt or ketchup. If using straight away, add the prawns and bind in a generous amount of sauce.

Building the Prawn Cocktail
1/2 avocado per person, skin and stone removed, diced into large pieces
Iceberg lettuce, cut 1cm thick
2 gem lettuce leaves
Prawns in brine
Marie rose sauce
1 cooked crevette, in the shell
1 lemon wedge

Mix the prawns with a generous amount of the marie rose sauce. In the serving dish, place the diced avocado, top with iceberg lettuce. Then follow with prawns bound in sauce. Garnish with one large, cooked, deheaded prawn, a wedge of lemon, gem lettuce, serve with buttered sliced brown bread.

Here’s something you weren’t expecting from me perhaps, but this is my favorite starter ever. This is prawn cocktail. Okay, we’re going to start by making a classic mayonnaise. You don’t have to do that. You can buy mayonnaise and just add these ingredients to it. But I like to do it. I want to show you how to do it. That is raw egg yolks. Into that is going a nice amount of Dijon mustard. In there is going to go 10 or 12 drops of Tabasco sauce. A little bit of worcester sauce. The other ingredients are really wet, so I’m going to use those to basically let the whole thing down at the other end. Little bit of salt in there. Little bit of magic black pepper in there. And then we just want a neutral oil, a nice vegetable oil. Nice and slowly. And this is ultimately how you make a mayonnaise. So into that goes a little bit of cognac. This is dry cherry. Into there is going to go some ketchup. Just classic ketchup. And here’s my little secret ingredient. It’s not water. That’s vodka. Tiny bit more ketchup in there. Just make it a little bit looser. And that is a fantastic merry rose sauce. Prawns go in. And when I put these prawns in, these are prawns in brine. That is looking like it’s going to end up in a sandwich for my lunch as well. That first things first, a little bit of chopped avocado. A lovely iceberg. Let’s go heavy on the prawns. Got to be generous. Nice chica lemon. Couple of pieces of gem lettuce. Nice creettes, which I’m just going to hang over the side. No prawn cocktail could possibly be right without the inclusion of a bit of brown bread and butter. I reckon that’s the best starter there is.

47 Comments

  1. actually no matter how you make these I can't like em, sorry. Love prawns but drenching them in cocktail sauce of any quality is a waste in my opinion 😢

  2. Any chance of a tomato purée free version 🫢 it’s ketchup kid.. Makes my tummy churn 🤮 Also.. I know he’s not a kid guys.. But I’m 46 so I earned the privilege 😂🤣😂

  3. I love a good prawn cocktail and majority of the time if I'm having a curry takeaway a prawn cocktail is my starter

  4. Beyond, say, $5m a year, what’s the drive to keep racking up the income? To what end? You can already afford wherever you want. Why can’t people see that it’s income at those levels that lead to these huge wealth disparities? What do you think happens after the first $5m to all that money? Rich people buy all the stuff that they can then use to make passive income. Ultimately stuff you can’t then afford (or even buy) because it pushes up prices of assets.

    Tax wealth, not work.

  5. It annoys the sh*t out of me when chefs say "you weren't expecting this from me"? Why? are your taste buds far superior to ours? Is prawn cocktail a common persons starter? it's better than the shite that chefs cook with cuckoo spit and deconstructed cr*p……

  6. as a kid, i had prawn cocktails without fail whenever they were on the menu….. an ignored great dish, i miss them. EDIT seeing this is a direct link to years long gone.

  7. Ha ha. Thats my lazy mayo cheat. Just add some stuff to the jar stuff. If you've made mayo from scratch before, cheat it. No one will know.

  8. Most people, at least in the US would ignore the lettuce I miss the avocado that is underneath. They would consider the lettuce just something for the shrimp to rest on and not something to eat.