Tempura¶
357 words on Food
When wondering what to eat to day, I ended up thinking I wanted to have something that’s light to eat and not terribly hard to make. And when browsing the kitchen shelves afterwards I discovered a pack of ready-made powder for making tempura that I bought a while ago. While the ready-made stuff isn’t the highest cuisine and I could have gotten a proper recipe off Chiho, this was a great opportunity to be lazy and use up that package…
Of course having something interesting inside the batter is important as well. And I submitted myself to a short trip to shopping hell – that nasty supermarket which is closest to our flat – to get that. While this always seems convenient, it almost always turns out to be a really bad idea because they just suck so badly. This time they had no shopping baskets, no cauliflower, no broccoli, no chicken breasts. And when I was asked whether I was happy with my shopping at the checkout I had to force myself to not say It sucked, as usual
but couldn’t resist saying it was bad. Which made the checkout girl look unhappy at which stage I just indicated I didn’t want to waste more time on that and left.
Returning home after the shopping I did some chopping of vegetables and the fish. Deep frying everything took a moment but mostly because there was so much of it. It turned out that getting the temperature right for this is very tricky. The fish and prawns came our reasonably well (though not as nice as they are at restaurants where people actually know what they are doing) with the crust being really crusty and fluffy. The crust on the vegetables ended up being too soft and greasy despite the process starting with the same temperature and all. Using an electric stove with its low temperatures and slow temperature changes probably didn’t help either.
While far from perfect, things still turned out edible. And people actually enjoyed the meal of tempura with some rice and assorted sauces (Japanese soy sauce, Sukiyaki sauce, Thai sweet-and-hot sauce, sesame oil).
