Shortcrust Tartlets with Kiwi, Prawns and Crispy Onion

Flour and butter here are a ratio, not a recipe — roughly half butter to flour by weight (75g to 150g) is the shortcrust baseline, and it's shortcrust because that much fat genuinely shortens the gluten strands, stopping them linking into the long chains that make bread chewy. You want plain flour precisely because it's low in protein; a strong bread flour here would fight you the whole way, building elasticity you then have to beat back out. Water is added cold and in the smallest amount that brings the dough together — too much and you've started building that gluten network again, the thing a pinch of salt also indirectly discourages by stiffening things slightly, well beyond just taste.

The rest is between two sheets of parchment because tartlet dough, rich in butter, tears and sticks to a floured worktop the moment it warms past fridge temperature — and in a British kitchen without a marble slab, parchment is the honest substitute for keeping it cool and intact while you roll. Pricking with a fork before baking isn't decoration; trapped air under a lining would blister the base into a dome, and a domed tartlet holds no cream.

Prawns: fresh or defrosted, it doesn't change the mechanism, only the starting moisture — frozen ones release more water as they cook, so pat them dry or your boiling water turns cloudy and the marinade gets diluted. If prawns aren't to hand, any firm white fish cut small follows the same 63°C logic, though the timing to get there will differ and you'll have to watch, not assume.

Kiwi wants to be ripe enough to yield under thumb pressure but not soft to the point of fermenting — underripe and you get a sourness no amount of salt balances; overripe and the texture turns to mush before the agar even gets involved. The pinch of salt in the blended fruit is there because fruit purees read as flatter than they taste on their own; salt isn't masking anything, it's sharpening what's already there, the same principle as salting a melon.

Agar-agar sets by boiling, briefly, which is the opposite habit from gelatine, which you'd melt gently and never let bubble. A scant teaspoon per this quantity of puree gives a cream firm enough to hold its shape on a spoon but not a solid block — if you've only got gelatine in the cupboard, you can use it, but you'll need to chill the tartlets afterward rather than leave them at room temperature, and the set will soften faster under a warm prawn.

Lime and ginger in the marinade aren't a flourish; they're doing a job on the prawn's texture as discussed, and ginger specifically carries a mild enzyme that nudges protein structure, which is partly why ginger-marinated meat and fish often feel more tender rather than just differently flavoured. The onion, sliced into thin petals and left raw, is the crunch and the sharp note against all that softness — if raw onion's harshness bothers you, a few minutes in cold water before serving pulls out some of the sulphur compounds responsible, no vinegar needed. Oil should carry no flavour of its own so it doesn't compete with lime and ginger — a light olive oil works, but anything neutral, including a mild vegetable oil, does the same job.

Feeds four as a starter, and the dough resting for its half hour is not time wasted — it's the gluten relaxing back down after you worked it, which is what stops the baked shell shrinking and pulling away from the tin. Skip that rest and you'll find out the hard way, with a tartlet smaller than the tin that made it.