Learning How to Make Tempura

by Carolina Santos-Neves, Epicurious.com


About a month ago, I started taking cooking classes in the Chef's Training Program at the Natural Gourmet Institute (NGI). This past Saturday we learned a lot of techniques, and one of them was how to deep-fry. What did we fry? Veggies! We made onion, carrot, and broccoli tempura.

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After watching our instructor demo all the necessary steps we were split into two groups. Naturally, she made it look easy, but for a beginner, it wasn't.

We used refined coconut oil for frying, and our batter was made up of whole-wheat pastry flour, corn meal, salt, pepper, kuzu (a root thickener superior to corn starch), smoked paprika (for flavoring), and just a little bit of seltzer water. Our group decided that we wanted our batter to be light and not too heavy, so we opted to use less of the kuzu. We stored the batter in the fridge until it was time to fry. (Keeping the batter as cold as possible is what keeps the tempura from getting too greasy and absorbing too much oil.)

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When it was frying time (the moment when the oil sizzled when we dipped a raw carrot into it), we quickly dipped individual veggies into the batter and then fried them in the oil. We then watched to see what happened to each piece. If the vegetable went straight to the bottom of the pan, that meant the oil was not hot enough, if it floated to the top that meant it was too hot. Ideally, each piece makes its way to the surface and floats.

Our first batch was an artistic disaster. Because our batter was too liquidy and our oil was too hot, the batter did not stick and our end result was a less than desirable. But we didn't let round one get in our way. We added a bit more flour, lowered the heat, and tried again. Eventually our end product fared pretty well.

Have you ever made tempura? What do you add to your batter, and what kind of oil to you like to use? Try these recipes at Epicurious.com.

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