Last night, I pulled some uncooked shrimp out of the refrigerator for dinner and had no idea what to do with it. I ran through a medley of ideas that I thought would be relatively fun. Shrimp and grits came to my mind, but I lacked ingredients at home that would have comprised my ideal version. It was also chilly outside here in Atlanta, and I had no desire to run to the store.

So my next idea was to make a simple pajeon – a Korean savory pancake. But I made an onion one that morning so I said to heck with that. I’m a little ADD when it comes to eating similar meals back to back.

So my eyes started wandering around my room and they eventually landed on Shizo Tsuji’s Japanese recipe book, Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art. When I saw the book, it hit me – shrimp tempura. In the past, I’ve had decent results with deep-frying so I decided to give it a go.

Following the book’s recipe for shrimp tempura, the first thing I did was dry the surface of the shrimp. I then made four shallow and separate cuts alongside each shrimp’s belly, and then flatten them straight out with the back of my knife. See my illustration to the left for the recommended cut areas (this is my interpretation of the book’s illustration). The purpose of this is so the shrimp doesn’t curl and clump when cooking. This procedure sounds tedious and it initially was. However, it eventually gets easier and before you know it, they’re all straightened and ready for cooking.

And then like the recipe says, prepare/organize your station with the essentials for preparing and frying tempura. The batter recipe for 1 cup worth of flour is 1 cup of ice cold water (cold batter aids in crispy texture) and 1 egg yolk. You also use a little additional dry flour for pre-coating your shrimp before dredging in your batter. As seen in my picture, from right to left I have my bowl of shrimp, loose flour, batter mixture, about a quart worth of peanut oil brought up to around 340-350 degrees, and a bowl with an oil absorbent towel. So the idea here is to make the frying seamless going right to left.

Let me note, that the book states to not fully mix the batter all together into a smooth uniform texture. It really should be clumpy and mixed briefly with chopsticks – purposely according to the book, because they are not a good mixing tool, and the fried texture of the tempura will have a better chance of being crispy. According to further research into this, what happens is overmixing will activate the wheat gluten in the batter causing the tempura outcome to be more doughy. Also, the batter should be prepared last so the temperature of it won’t drop as fast (some styles call for placing the bowl of prepared batter in a larger bowl of ice, which I did not do here).

So how did I do my first time? I definitely had a more dough-like outcome than that crispy heavenliness associated with well-made tempura. I also tried to do the whole right-to-left process all with cooking chopsticks so my initial tempura results came out more curled. From my picture to the left, you can see how the batch on the right were chopsticks-handled and the ones to the left were finger-handled. This made me think of something Sensei Kessler recently mentioned to me about tempura cooking “required a certain touch.”

The shrimp I used were also too small (about 3 inches when straightened), or “delicate” I should say for my skill level. Here in America I generally see shrimp tempura used with much larger shrimp. Last Spring in Kyoto, Japan, I watched a tempura chef effortlessly prepare and fry shrimp the size of the ones I had. I’m obviously not quite there yet.

No recipe this time because I wouldn’t even classify my version last night as tempura. In the meantime, watch this space and maybe I’ll eventually get that touch Kessler was talking about.

– by Gene Lee, Food and More blog

– Gene Lee writes about International Cuisine for the AJC Dining Team. He also publishes his own blog, Eat, Drink, Man… A Food Journal.