Mazara Red Prawns

The Mazara red prawn is Aristaeomorpha foliacea, a deep-water crustacean that lives on muddy slopes between 300 and 800 metres. It is not a coastal prawn that grew big; it is a different animal, adapted to cold and darkness, and everything else follows from that.

At those depths the water sits around thirteen or fourteen degrees year round. Metabolism is slow, growth is slow, and the flesh accumulates free amino acids, glycine above all, which is the chemical reason a raw red prawn tastes sweet rather than briny.

The second reason it is eaten raw is the head. The cephalothorax holds the hepatopancreas, which fishermen call the corallo: a dense orange cream that is the most flavourful part of the animal. Heat dries it out in seconds. Raw, you suck it straight from the head, and it is half the reason the price is what it is.

Mazara is not a protected designation, it is a port, the largest fishing fleet in Italy, working grounds up to two hundred miles from home. The prawn is a Strait of Sicily animal landed at Mazara del Vallo or Sciacca, and the identical species is landed in Spain and Tunisia under other names.

Raw, it is closer to a scallop or to raw langoustine than to any cooked prawn: sweet, faintly nutty, with a soft, almost creamy texture and a clean marine finish that arrives late and stays. There is no iodine bite and no shellfish tang.

The head is a separate flavour entirely. The orange paste inside is rich, mineral and slightly bitter, somewhere between sea urchin and brown crab meat, and it is intense enough that one head seasons a mouthful of pasta.

Cooked for thirty seconds the flesh turns firm and springy and tastes of concentrated sweet prawn. Cooked for two minutes it tastes like an expensive version of a supermarket prawn, which is the whole trap.

Mostly, do not cook them. Peel the tail leaving the head attached, pull out the dark intestinal thread, lay them on a cold plate and dress with good olive oil and a pinch of salt. Lemon, if you want it, goes on at the table, because acid starts curing the surface within a minute or two.

If they were frozen at sea, thaw them slowly overnight in the fridge, covered, sitting on a rack so they are not lying in their own liquid. Never under running water, never in a microwave. If instead you bought them fresh and want to eat them raw, Italian rules require freezing first: minus twenty for twenty-four hours, or minus eighteen for ninety-six, which at home means four days in a three-star freezer.

When you do cook them, cook them barely. Thirty to forty seconds a side in a very hot dry pan, until the flesh goes from glassy to just pink. In pasta they go in off the heat, with the sauce already finished, and warm through in the residual heat.

Never throw the heads away. Crushed in a pan with a little oil, they give you a dense orange base in five minutes that beats any fish stock; toasted shells make a bisque worth freezing in cubes. In Sicily the raw prawns are also served with a spoonful of lemon granita alongside, or with crushed almonds. Two ingredients, not five.

Frozen at sea is the normal form abroad. At minus eighteen degrees a pack holds around six months with no obvious change and up to a year with some loss of firmness, and the date on the box is the reference. Thawing has to be slow: overnight in the fridge, in a closed container, resting on a rack so the prawns are not lying in their own liquid. Running water, a microwave or hours on the counter all drive water out of the muscle, and a prawn thawed fast cooks up mealy. After thawing, a second freeze leaves the flesh slack and watery.

Fresh ones are worked through within a day, kept on ice in the coldest part of the fridge. If they are not going straight into a pan, pull the heads off and bag heads and tails separately: the enzymes behind the blackening sit in the head, and it changes far faster than the tail does. Cooked prawns hold a day. Stock reduced from the heads freezes in cubes for three months.

The colour is a live, even coral red across the whole animal, head and legs included. The other deep water prawn landed by the same fleet, Aristaeus antennatus, carries a red head on a body that shifts towards pinkish blue: an excellent thing, but a different one. The shell should be taut and glossy, the eyes black and full, the antennae unbroken, and the raw flesh translucent to the point of looking glassy. Flesh that has gone white and opaque points to age, or to a prawn thawed and frozen a second time. The head should feel heavy and stay firmly attached to the body.

Blackening on the head and at the leg joints is melanosis, an enzymatic oxidation of the shell, and the sulphites declared on some labels are there to slow it. In freezer cabinets abroad the lookalike is Argentine red shrimp, cheaper by a wide margin. Read the label for the Latin species name, FAO area 37, the fishing gear and the words frozen at sea.

Very little of this prawn leaves Italy, and what does leaves frozen. That is not a compromise: prawns blast-frozen at minus forty within minutes of hauling are generally better than anything sold as fresh after five days on ice.

In the US and UK the practical options are specialist frozen-seafood importers, the occasional Italian delicatessen with a freezer, and Spanish carabineros, which are easier to find and closely comparable. Argentine red shrimp, sold in every good frozen aisle, is the affordable stand-in.

Expect 40 to 90 euros per kilo for good frozen-at-sea Sicilian prawns, roughly 19 to 44 dollars per pound, or 34 to 78 pounds per kilo, with large grades going past 140 euros. Anything advertised as red prawn at 15 euros a kilo is a different species.

On the label, look for the Latin species name, FAO area 37, the gear type, and the words for frozen at sea. Also look for a sulphite declaration: sodium metabisulphite is legal and widely used to stop the heads blackening, but it treats appearance rather than quality, and asthmatics and sulphite-sensitive people react to it. Untreated prawns discolour faster and are usually the better buy.

Mazara del Vallo, in the province of Trapani, is the obvious place: trawlers moored side by side along the Mazaro river, the Kasbah quarter with its tiled doorways and long-established Tunisian community, and restaurants where raw prawns are a fixed line on the menu rather than a special. The Museo del Satiro holds a Greek bronze that the fleet dredged up from the same seabed in the late 1990s.

Sciacca, the other big fishing port on the south coast, cooks the same repertoire; Marsala and Trapani complete the triangle, between salt pans, fish couscous and bottarga. In Palermo the red prawn turns up in seafood restaurants and on the raw counters of the historic markets.

In Mazara itself, ask where the boats unload: in that town the best of the catch often never reaches a shop.