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Thai · Seafood

Prawn stir-fry

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Prawn stir-fry

About this recipe

Thai cooking balances four flavours in every dish — sweet, sour, salty, spicy — anchored to the day's market. Fish sauce, fresh herbs, chiles, citrus, and palm sugar are the constants; the rest changes with what's freshest.

As a seafood dish, Prawn stir-fry demands timing precision: the difference between perfect and overcooked is often less than 90 seconds, and the result of overshooting is a textural penalty there's no fixing.

The scaler above rewrites every measurement to your target serving count, with proper culinary fractions (½, ⅓, ¼) instead of decimals so the recipe stays measurable. Cook Mode steps you through it hands-free.

Curated by the ScaleRecipe editorial teamReviewed

Recipe data is sourced from TheMealDB's open community database; ScaleRecipe handles the curation, the scaling math, the editorial commentary, and the conversion utilities woven into each page.

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Method

  1. step 1
  2. Put the prawns in a bowl. Put the chilli, garlic, coriander stalks (snip these up using scissors first) and caster sugar in a spice grinder or small food processor and whizz together. Add half of the lime juice and the fish sauce, then pour this over the prawns.
  3. step 2
  4. Heat 1 tbsp oil in a wok, add the ginger and spring onions and fry for 1 min. Add the red pepper and fry for 1 min, until the pepper starts to soften. Add the water chestnuts and bean sprouts, and toss together until the bean sprouts start to wilt. Add the soy sauce and a really good grind of black pepper, then tip the lot into a serving dish.
  5. step 3
  6. Heat the remaining oil in the wok and add the prawns, lifting them out of their juices. Toss for 1-2 mins until they turn pink, add the marinade and swirl the wok quickly, then tip the lot onto the veg. Snip over the coriander leaves and sprinkle on the remaining lime. Serves over noodles with extra lime for squeezing over.

Cooking notes

Scaling works best when you weigh ingredients rather than measure by volume — small differences in packing can compound at higher multipliers.

For volume-to-weight conversions of any ingredient — flour, sugar, butter, salts — use the ingredient converter. To translate the recipe's oven temperature between °C, °F and gas mark, see the temperature converter.

When you scale this recipe up or down, remember that cooking time does not scale linearly. A doubled cake takes longer, but not twice as long; a doubled soup takes roughly twice as long. The cooking-time guide gives sensible starting estimates by dish geometry.

Scaling notes

Scaling Prawn stir-fry

Prawn stir-fry is written for around four servings as it stands on this page — scaling it up for a party or down for a meal-for-one is the small math problem most home cooks face every week. Here's how this particular dish responds to scaling, what changes linearly, and what doesn't.

Seafood is the most scaling-sensitive protein because the overcooking window is narrow and the penalty is steep. Scale Prawn stir-fry per piece if you can — cook three fillets in two batches rather than crowd the pan into one. Sauce-based seafood dishes scale linearly, but always taste before adding more salt: brininess from the seafood itself doesn't scale predictably.

Skip the math entirely — ScaleRecipe's scaler rewrites every ingredient line above with proper culinary fractions and smart unit promotion the moment you change the serving count. Open the scaler →

Beyond the recipe

Substitutions & make-ahead — Prawn stir-fry

If you're cooking Prawn stir-fry for a future meal (or doubling up for leftovers), here's how this dish handles storage, reheating, and the timing decisions most recipes don't spell out.

Make-ahead, storage, and reheating

Seafood is the worst-tempered category for make-ahead — texture and flavour both degrade quickly after cooking. Prawn stir-fry should ideally be cooked the day it's served. If a make-ahead is unavoidable, prep components (the sauce, marinade, vegetables, garnishes) the day before and cook the fish or shellfish at the last moment. Cooked seafood develops a pronounced fishy off-flavour within 24 hours even when properly refrigerated.

Recipe video

Prawn stir-fry

Go deeper

Where this recipe sits in the wider tradition.

Each guide below is a real essay on the cuisine or the category — pillars, staples, techniques worth learning — paired with a curated grid of recipes filed under it.

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