Australian · Starter
Moreton Bay Bugs, Split and Grilled
- Intermediate
- 20 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, acid holding everything up to the light, with warmth in the tail.
Ingredients
- 4 raw Moreton Bay bugs, about 250 g each
- 100 g soft unsalted butter
- 3 garlic cloves, grated
- 1 long red chilli, finely chopped
- zest of 1 lemon
- 2 tbsp flat leaf parsley, finely chopped
- sea salt flakes
- 1 lemon, cut into cheeks
Equipment
Grill · Grater / zester
The skills inside
Allergen screen
Found: dairy · shellfish
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Chill the bugs in the freezer for 20 minutes until they are still, then split each one lengthways through the head with one stroke of a heavy knife and lift out the dark gut thread. 20 min
- Beat the butter with the garlic, chilli, lemon zest, parsley and a good pinch of salt, and press it into the split tails.
- Set the halves shell down on a fiercely hot barbecue plate or grill and leave them there. Do not turn them at any point.
- Grill 5 to 6 minutes until the butter is bubbling and the flesh has gone from glassy to chalk white right through the thickest part of the tail, then serve with the lemon cheeks. 6 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Griddle & plancha work 45 recipes
- Full contact with the metal: the food lies flat, with no dome in the middle and no curled edge lifting it away, so browning reaches the entire face rather than a ring of it.
- Contact is immediate and audible, and the food stays where it is put rather than sliding around in a slick of its own released liquid.
- The cooked face is an unbroken sheet of even colour: the whole surface browned, not a pattern of marks with pale ground between them, and not a dark centre with pale corners.
- The metal around the food is dry: no spreading wet patch steaming out from under it, nothing weeping onto the surface and boiling there.
- Turned once or twice and no more, and lifted while the crust is still brown: a piece flipped repeatedly never holds heat long enough to build one.
Where it goes wrong The surface was crowded and its temperature crashed, so everything gave up its water at once and stewed on the metal: pale, damp, grey at the edges, and stuck fast where the crust never got the chance to form.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Champagne: when lost, bubbles
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais, lightly chilled
- From the Taps
- Pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus
The universal donors: acid, bubbles, and low tannin rescue nearly any plate: the sommelier’s honest safety net.
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