Tonight we go back to using a recipe from The Joy of Japanese Cooking. This was super simple and easy to make but for some reason I always felt intimidated by the idea of making tempura. Now that I’ve made my very first attempt I want to try making different types of tempura. Yam tempura comes to mind right away.
The book explains that it’s best to use clean and light oil such as a new bottle of vegetable oil for frying. I used peanut oil that had been sitting on my counter for several months. For my first attempt I was not very picky and did not mind this so much.
I used black tiger shrimp and I prepped the thawed shrimp by removing the shells and making three slits along the belly. The book explains that doing this prevents the shrimp from curling so much as it fries.
For the batter I simply mixed a cup of ice water with one egg yolk. I sifted half a cup of cake flour into a shallow bowl and once the oil was heated, I dipped a shrimp into the egg and water mixture, rolled it in the flour and placed it in the oil. It took about two minutes to cook each shrimp at medium heat.
Shrimp Tempura, originally uploaded by paintpaste.
