🇯🇵 How to Make Tempura

Craving Tempura? On FoodNeverComes the food never actually comes — so here's how to make real Tempura at home, in about 25 min, with stuff you probably already have.

🛒 Ingredients

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• 8 large prawns, peeled, tails on, deveined
• veg: sweet potato rounds, green beans, sliced pumpkin or aubergine
• Batter: 1 cup plain flour + 1 cup ICE-COLD sparkling water + 1 egg yolk
• extra flour for dusting
• oil for deep frying
• Dip: ¼ cup dashi + 2 tbsp soy + 1 tbsp mirin, warmed (or just salt + lemon)

👩‍🍳 Method

1. Make 2–3 shallow cuts across the belly of each prawn and press it gently straight — this stops the dramatic curl.
2. Get the oil to 180°C. Keep the sparkling water in the fridge until the last second: COLD batter hitting HOT oil is the entire physics of tempura.
3. Make the batter at the last moment: yolk into the icy water, flour in, then stir with chopsticks about 5 times. It must stay lumpy with dry flour pockets. Smooth batter = doughnut coating.
4. Dust everything lightly with flour, drag through the batter, and slide into the oil away from you.
5. Fry in small batches: veg 2–3 min, prawns 1–2 min, until pale gold and whisper-crisp — tempura is blonde, not brown. Skim the crumbs between batches.
6. Drain on a rack, eat within minutes with the warm dip. Tempura has a shorter life than an ice cream in the sun.