Tempura: Japanese Dish of Deep-Fried Vegetables And Seafood

Tempura is Japanese food in the form of seafood, vegetables, or wild plants are dipped into the dough of flour and egg yolk diluted with cold water then fried with a lot of cooking oil until light yellow. Tempura does not refer to the dish. But more to the process of coating meat or vegetables with tempura batter. Then the ingredients are fried with a lot of oil. Therefore, in fact anything can be a tempura. Starting from cheese to fish can be made tempura.

Tempura also means a different way of frying with furai (Japanese term for deep fry). Tempura fried foods are dyed into tempura dough, while deep fry fried foods are wrapped sequentially with flour, egg whisk, and panir flour. The dough is made from a mixture of eggs and flour. The ingredients are mixed lightly with cold water. When each ingredient is battered, it's important to keep the dough cool. So that the coating layer of tempura thin and crisp when fried.

Cooking oil used for frying tempura preferably clean cooking oil and has not been used to fry other foodstuffs. In upscale restaurants that provide tempura menus, expensive sesame oil mixtures and cottonseed oil are often used for tempura frying. Camellia oil used by sumo wrestlers as hair oil is also used in some expensive restaurants to fry tempura. When frying tempura meat or vegetables, it is necessary to ensure the oil is at a very high temperature before putting it in a frying pan. This can ripen tempura immediately. Because if long waiting for the surface of the tempura so golden brown, can damage the freshness of food.

The most popular seafood tempura is probably ebi (shrimp) tempura. Types of seafood used in tempura includes:

• Prawn
• Shrimp
• Squid
• Scallop
• Crab
• Ayu (sweetfish)
• Fish
• Cod, etc

Vegetables tempura is called yasai tempura. The all vegetable tempura might be served as a vegetarian dish. Types of vegetables includes:

• Bamboo shoots
• Bell pepper
• Butternut squash
• Carrot
• Eggplant
• Gobo (burdock, Arctium lappa)
• Green beans
• Mushrooms, etc

Tempura can be eaten away or accompanied by another dish. Most tempura eaten with rice. But delicious also used as topping udon or buckwheat. In general, tempura ordinary vegetables are eaten as an appetizer, while tempura meat matches with donburi or rice. There are many ways of presenting tempura, depending on what is available.