Tempura - New Thread

[BaconEater]

Great, thanks!

 

First, hello all, I just joined this forum. I love trying to make new types of food, but I keep it pretty simple. My goal is to have a repertoire of fairly easy to make dishes, that taste incredible. Recently I decided to give tempura ago. Here in Bangkok there are a couple of sublime tempura places. I went to one of them twice, and was extremely impressed. Their batter is thin, crisp, and very sophisticated, and the ingredients they use (the cooked items, and the 6 salts they provide for dipping - and there's a certain matching that they recommend too) are really top notch. Not cheap, though.

 

This is a bit of a long story but the end result was a really great tempura... hope it isn't too long to enjoy...

 

I had trouble making a really good batter and then I found a vodka tempura batter recipe.

 

The vodka tempura recipe I found is here: https://www.marthastewart.com/326812/vodka-tempura-batter

 

Without posting it in full, I do think that I've changed it somewhat, but I really don't know how much change justifies posting it as a new recipe. It only has 3 ingredients!

 

Problem I had: the recipe makes a lot of batter and then you don't know what to do with it. After cooking up a couple serves of food, there's still about 60% left! And this was after I already tried to reduce the quantities of vodka and flour by about 30-35%. Also, I use a packaged tempura batter which is different from what's in the recipe. And somewhere down the track I might use duck egg instead of chicken egg... I think it would be fair enough to link the old one and then detail my fairly different new one, but I'll wait for experience user advice here before I do. I put the vodka in the freezer until it's really cold, maybe sub zero. The recipe says "ice cold" - technically that's 0 degrees but let's not split hairs :). As written, the recipe made rather good tempura with oysters and fish.

 

But guess what... I put the leftover batter mix in the fridge and it stayed there 2 days, and then I was wanting to cook again. The batter looked bad - the flour basically filled most of the bowl and looked kind of thick and gluggy, and the liquid was a thin 1-2m sheen on top of that. But I didn't want it to go to waste, and the fish I was making was really cheap (but a nice one) tilapia. So if I screwed it up, I wouldn't feel too bad. I decided to whisk the batter mix fully, which goes against the usual advice for tempura batter, which says lumps are good. I stirred it vigorously until it was smooth. Then I put it in the freezer.

 

I prepped the fish, and then when it was dusted in flour, I brought out the very cold batter mix and used it to cook the fish. I don't like overusing oil so I actually shallow fry but perhaps a little deeper than true shallow. But certainly not enough to submerge the fish. The fish is sitting in oil that comes up half way or a little higher once 3 pieces of the fish is in the (small) pot, raising the oil level. Well... it came out AMAZING. Even better than the 1st day with the fresh batter.

 

I think the fact that I whisked the batter mix fully wasn't the real plus. That was probably a minus but wasn't noticeable. What I think made the difference is this:

 

The entire batter mix had been in the fridge for 2 days and then went into the freezer before cooking. So the whole thing was really really cold. According to the original recipe, you're using ice cold vodka but you're mixing in room temperature flour. My kitchen ain't cold, coz I'm in Bangkok! So I think adding the pretty warm flour raised the temperature and counteracted the vodka temp somewhat (and you want batter mix to stay cold while cooking).

 

So I think another tweak I will make to this recipe is to keep the flour in the fridge. And then when you make the batter mix with subzero temp vodka, you are also using cold flour. And then once you mixed it, if you don't immediately use it, or maybe on purpose for a little while, put it in the freezer so it's all super cold. Then bring it out when ready to cook, and use it with the food. Might even make sense to bring SOME out into a bowl, leaving the remainder in the freezer, and bring out more as you need it, so every batch benefits from really cold batter mix.

 

Something about the particular batter / fish characteristics on this 2nd try: it just seemed so easy to know when it was perfect and ready. I let the batter go just a little bit gold, or very slightly brown, and removed the fish, and it was perfectly done. Crispy outside, moist and flaky inside.

 

I would like to be able to just do a TLDR version which is the final version of the recipe that I think would totally rule, but I will wait for guidance before doing that.

Thanks for reading.

Cheers!

BE