Prawns As Big As Your Head!
Ok, maybe not that big, but each one was more than a quarter pound! That’s a lot o’ prawn! My wife and I found these at Jungle Jim’s in Fairfield, Ohio, and I couldn’t pass them up.
I wanted to do something a little different with these than just boil them and dip them in cocktail sauce, so I shelled them and added a strip of jalapeño pepper and some cheese down the back of the prawn, then wrapped the whole thing with bacon.
One lesson I learned making these was to secure the bacon better; it’s tough to put toothpicks in the prawns while they’re cooking! It’s much easier to do it prior to grilling.
So I lit a chimney of charcoal as I was prepping the prawns, and got a good fire going before spreading it out a bit and grilling these babies. I didn’t cook these over too much heat as I didn’t want the bacon to burn. The end result was fantastic, with a good amount of shrimpy-ness, with just a touch of heat from the pepper, and smokey bacony goodness all around!
I’ll definitely do these again, only with better secured bacon next time… As big as these prawns were, it took 2 strips of bacon for each. They took about 3-4 minutes on a side, and they were just perfect.
Great looking shrimp - at what is the darn difference between ’shrimp’ & ‘prawns’? …this is the big question!
Two ideas on the bacon:
1. use one larger piece of pancietta that is affixed to just one side of the meat with a toothpick…kinda like a mortar board. When you start grilling - the shrimp is on top of the pancietta and it cooks firs, then when you turn the combo, the fat drips over the shrimp meat which take much less time to cook than the bacon.
2. Use very thin bacon, so it cooks rapidly - since shrimp doesn’t need a lot of time on the heat to cook.
CB