This recipe, 11-14: Tempura tastes great, but the amount of prep is so arduous that I would rather pay a chef at a restaurant to make it for me.
Mixed tempura is my favorite starter dish whenever Jamie and I go out to a sushi restaurant. 🍣
We didn’t fry in sesame oil, just plain canola oil because it is the cheapest and has the best characteristics for frying.
Lots of ingredients were needed for this recipe. We got the mirin and daikon radish specifically for this recipe.
Editor’s note: The mirin was intended as a more versatile replacement for the sake–you can find it (and the sake) in the Asian food section of the supermarket. The daikon radish is the Japanese radish called for in the recipe guidelines.)
Check out my egg separating skills. We needed the yolk and white separated because of the method for adding them into the batter.
I added the egg yolks to the water and flour mixture.
Jamie was a good tag team partner for this epic recipe. She prepared the vegetables and fish while I made the batter and made the sauce.
After adding the egg yolks, I added the slightly beaten egg whites. The batter still should be lumpy according to the recipe card. It definitely was lumpy.
Jamie set up a fryer assembly line.
The first batch of fish dropped into the oil with a satisfying “hiss”. The eggs in the batter created the weird strings in the batter that separated off the main piece of fish. These were skimmed out as we went along.
This grater is extremely sharp. I shredded the daikon radish and for the first time, I didn’t cut myself on this grater.
That’s such a nice looking spear of tempura zucchini.
Jamie set up the drying station with a rack and a sheet pan.
After we fried all the fish and a quarter of the zucchini, we got tired and I packed up the rest of the vegetables for stir fry later in the week. This tempura did taste identical to the tempura I would get from the local sushi joint, minus some much needed salt in the batter.
The sauce tasted similar to the stuff from the restaurant, but the shredded daikon made the consistency different than you would normally find. All in all the food tasted great, but because of all the labor, the experience of eating in the restaurant is much better.
Grade: B
