Posted by Bone at August 25th, 2005

I know this is only very loosely advice (maybe a ‘Recipes’ category would be a step too far?) but I thought I’d share my recent adventures in Tempura with you.

I’ve always been a fan of pretty much anything battered and deep-fried, but in my rather health concious household I’ve struggled to get more than a smattering of oil into a frying pan or wok. Tonight was slightly different, we had vegetables as usual, but this time I actually wanted to eat them. Why, well rather obviously because of the prologue, they were tempura-fied my friends.

There’s not really much more to say than they were tasty-licious and really not that hard to make at all. I’d be tempted to say that if you were having a dinner party and wanted to accommodate vegetarians then these could be suitable for both the veggies and the omnivores.

The recipe for the batter is:
85g plain flour
1tablespoon of cornflour
1/2 tablespoon sea salt
200ml ice cold sparkling water
ice cubes

Sift the the two flours into a bowl, put in the salt, whisk in the water, then add the ice cubes to keep the batter cold. Dip the vegetables into the batter (pretty much any veg will do, if you think it will work, it probably will) then put them into the hot oil.

We found that the batter struggled to stick to things like mushrooms, rolling them in flour before dipping in the batter seems to help (at least it did with the desert bananas - del.ic.io.us).

There’s also a simple dip to go with them that’s really nice:

3 tablespoons of soy sauce
3 tablespoons of sherry
1 tablespoon of suger
Zest of 1 lemon

Just mix them all together in a little bowl, simple enough for anyone I think.

And that’s the end of the cookery lesson for today.

(maybe I’ll give sushi a try next time…)