Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–I’m glad you’re here!
Today, I’m continuing my series on the seven fundamental sauces of California Cuisine. While there is not a definitive list of foundational or “mother” sauces of California Cuisine, I am positing that they are the following: mayonnaise, vinaigrette, pesto, salsa, basic tomato sauce, Bernaise (or Hollandaise) and chimichurri sauce. This week, I started the series by sharing my recipe for a basic mayonnaise, followed by thoughts on aioli and its siblings, pesto aioli and roasted red bell pepper aioli, and yesterday, I shared my recipe for the best ever tartar sauce.
Today, I’m continuing my exploration of mayonnaise by sharing a recipe for a Chinese restaurant standard: honey pecan prawns, which features a creamy sweet and sour sauce made primarily with mayonnaise:
Here in California, we can get some of the best Chinese food in the country, thanks to the many Chinese immigrants who have settled here over the years. Perhaps it’s that easy access that has deterred me from tackling Chinese food seriously as a cook, or perhaps it’s the complexity of the cuisine that has intimidated me. In any case, I make a dandy stir-fry at the end of the week out of the leftover vegetables and bits of meat in the fridge, but I almost never attempt to make any of the more popular restaurant dishes at home.
However, this week was different: since I am doing articles that feature mayonnaise, I decided to tackle prawns in a creamy mayonnaise sauce, most commonly known as “honey walnut prawns” in restaurants. This dish has long been my favorite at our local Chinese restaurant, and it seemed tailor-made for my series on the seven sauces of California Cuisine. Instead of walnuts, I used pecans, partially because of my Texas heritage (pecans are the state nut, and a personal favorite), but also because I happened to have candied pecans on hand. I also used pecan oil in which to fry the shrimp, which was a very happy coincidence–you see, since I almost never fry food, the bottle of vegetable oil that I had had gone rancid. Not wanting to have to go to the grocery store just for oil, I decided to use the pecan oil because I had it on hand. Well–the combination of the candied pecans, the shrimp fried in pecan oil and the tangy sweet and sour sauce was really quite delightful!
Enjoy this dish with a nice glass of Gewürztraminer or a nicely oaked chardonnay.
Join me next week when I continue my exploration of mayonnaise, including a very retro dessert!
Until then,
Peace, love and good food,
Keri
