Boiling the oil

I was rather apprehensive when La Fuji Mama announced that this month's Washoku Warriors challenge was tempura. I enjoy eating it, don't get me wrong, but cooking it myself? Tempura cooking fires are a danger I heard about in spades and then got to take my hand at putting out when I went to the Tachikawa Bosaikan (a hands-on disaster prevention museum). Then there is the mess involved in cooking with oil - judging by the complaints I've heard just thinking about cooking with oil could condemn my kitchen (such as it is) to be permanently coated in inches of oily sludge. When I told U that our challenge this month was tempura he wasn't pleased either. But I insisted and he gradually warmed to it - as long as I would agree to doing more than just the kakiage (mixed veggies) the challenge called for.

So we headed out on Saturday afternoon to do our grocery shop, me attempting to faithfully pick up the veggies the recipe called for and U questioning every vegetable I chose.

U - "What? You're using sweet potato? Why?!??"
Me - "Because that is what the recipe calls for."
U - "But kakiage doesn't need sweet potato. Why are you buying carrots?"
Me - "Because that is what the recipe calls for."
U - "But kakiage doesn't need carrots. Why aren't you buying lotus root?"
Me - "Because the recipe doesn't call for it."
U - "But kakiage needs lotus root! Why aren't you buying baby shrimp?"
Me - "Because the recipe doesn't call for it."
U - "But kakiage needs baby shrimp!"

and on... and on...

In the end we agreed on burdock root, and I was able to convince him on the carrot (because we cheated and bought it already julienned with the burdock root) and the sweet potato but gave up on the parsnip (I'm not sure I could have found it here anyways) and used lotus root instead. We also bought a package of big shrimp to make up separately. We decided to go ahead and make up the kakiage with all the veggies we had bought - and ended up with a LOT of extras. I followed Andoh's advice and froze them and am looking forward to heating them up and trying out two more of Andoh's recipes to reuse them - putting the kakiage over noodles or rice with sauce.

As for the actual cooking...



It turned out to be not nearly as scary/messy/difficult as I had worried. Our only problem was that, without a thermometer, we couldn't check the temperature of the oil and I'm fairly sure that we ended up cooking our tempura in oil that just wasn't quite hot enough.

The poor shrimp were first, and took the brunt of the oil's low temperature, I think - not quite getting the golden browny colour the should have, and ending up a little on the soggy side.



We had two sweet potatoes left over after we mixed up the kakiage veggies and decided to just slice them up and tempura them too.



Wow... what a good idea! These were delicious! Since I made a number of the flavoured salts (matcha salt, goma/sesame seed salt, sansho salt) while U was frying up the shrimp and the first batch of sweet potato, we just HAD to test it and the tempura too... mmmm... I think we ended up eating about half the sweet potato that way - "just one more, I haven't tried this salt yet..." mmmm!



And then, of course, the kakiage - which turned out surprisingly well, sticking together and even making relatively the right shape (except when I got over ambitious and put too much in, and even then it was pretty forgiving!)



Our meal was terribly unbalanced - three types of tempura with just rice and miso soup to round it out - but oh so yummy.



The clean-up wasn't nearly as bad as I had worried either (bless U, he's a real keeper as he did more than his fair share of the clean-up!) so who knows, tempura may make an appearance in our kitchen again. Although I have a feeling U will insist on choosing the ingredients next time...