This is a wonderful dish to try at home, it looks stunning but is surprisingly simple to make. The crispy salty oysters served with the sweet apricot puree is just delicious.
Cooking rock oysters is a great way to convert people who are nervous about oysters into oyster lovers. My mum swore she would never eat an oyster, nope, not for her. I then cooked some for her and she ate them as quickly as I could cook them! For oyster lovers, cooking oysters seems to intensify the flavour and firms up the texture to that of a cooked mussel, they are delicious. Just be sure to only cook a rock oyster as native oysters are far too delicate to be cooked.
Serves 4
INGREDIENTS
Oysters
- 12 oysters
- 20g of cornflour
- 1000ml of oil
Tempura Batter
- 50g of cornflour
- 50g of rice flour
- 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1 pinch of salt
- 50ml of vodka
- 50ml of water
Apricot Puree
- 6 apricots, pitted
- 1 pinch of salt
- 60g of caster sugar
- 50ml of orange juice
To serve
- 200g of rock salt
For the apricot purée, chop the apricots and mix with the salt and sugar. Put in a pan and cook to a thick chunky purée. Blitz in a blender adding some orange juice to thin it if required.
For the tempura batter, put the ingredients in a blender and blend for 10 seconds to make a light batter. If it’s too thin then add more flour. If it's too thick add a little more water.
Remove the oysters from their shells and put aside. Sterilise the oyster shells by scraping away the excess oyster from inside the shell and boiling them in water for 5 minutes, then plunge them into cold water.
Heat a deep fat fryer filled with the oil. Lightly dust the oysters in the remaining cornflour. Dip into the batter and deep fry for around 2 minutes or until crispy. Drain on kitchen paper.
To plate, spoon some rock salt onto a plate. Sit the sterilised shells on it, spoon some apricot purée into each and put the hot fried oysters on top. Serve immediately.