Tempura

Tempura are battered and deep-fried vegetables, seafood, and so on. They are best served hot with tempura dipping sauce or salt. Grated daikon radish is a common condiment to put in the sauce. If you know some tips, it's not so hard to make delicious tempura at home. All ingredients can be found easily at your local grocery stores. Actually, you can make tempura with various ingredients. Common Ingredients are shrimp, squid, green bell pepper, eggplant, sweet potatoes, potatoes, kabocha, carrot, mushrooms, shiso (perilla), and so on.

Tips for Making Crispy Tempura:

• It's good to use cold/ice water for the batter. This is important to prevent the batter from absorbing too much oil.
• Preparing the batter ahead of time is not recommended. It's good to make the batter right before frying tempura. Try not to over mix the batter and not to coat ingredients with the batter too much.
• If you are frying both seafood and vegetables, try to fry vegetables first, then fry seafood.
• It's said that the right temperature to fry tempura is around 340-360 degree F. To check the temperature of frying oil, drop a little bit of batter into the oil. If the batter comes up right away instead of sinking to the bottom of the pan, it's higher than 370 degrees F. If the batter goes halfway to the bottom and comes up, it's about 340-360 degrees F.

Tempura Variations:

• Tempura Udon / Tempura Soba - Udon or soba noodles are served in hot soup with tempura toppings.
• Tendon - Tempura is served on top of steamed plain rice.