Japanese Cooking - Contemporary & Traditional (16 page)

This famous and wonderful Japanese dish, like sushi, is so highly regarded by the Japanese that people rarely make it at home, leaving it to highly skilled chefs at tempura restaurants. Very good tempura can be expensive, too, but so delicate, light, and tasty that one finds it difficult to believe that it is just vegetables with batter. In no way does it taste like onion rings.

Tempura is a perfect balance of vegetables coated with just the right amount of batter and deep-fried to a light, crispy perfection. It is then dipped in a soy-based sauce and eaten together with rice. Altogether, it can be a heavenly experience. On the other hand, bad tempura will usually have more batter than the star ingredient inside and be oily and soggy. It is all in the technique of preparation and cooking, and can be duplicated at home once a few tricks are mastered.

Here is an idea for tempura that adds substance, texture, and variety to a platter of vegetable tempura. Tempeh strips are wrapped in nori, dipped in tempura batter, and fried until crispy. The result is a meaty substance with flavors of the sea
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a great vegan addition to tempura veggies. If you tell someone from Japan what you’re eating, however, they will be baffled, since tempeh is not found in Japan.

A medley of thinly slivered vegetables, primarily root vegetables, are held together by tempura batter and deep-fried into little cakes. This allows the cook to vary the medley with different vegetable combinations, as well as “season” it by adding ingredients such as slivered shiso leaves, nori, or sesame seeds. Although here I describe more of a method rather than an exact recipe, the important point is not to use too much batter or to overmix. Over-bandling will yield a heavy cake with lots of doughy batter. Be light-banded with both the amount of tempura batter you mix in and how you combine it with the vegetables.