I was feeling very confident about making tempura after last week, but this week turned into a bit of a flop. Before I talk about that let’s get into my learning process.
Youtube – I started off with one of my favourite youtube chefs. I linked to his video last week but here is his recipe. I made a few mistakes that I wanted to correct last time, so I rewatched the part of the video where he made the batter several times, because I was determined to have better batter this time. Overall I think I did pretty well on this part. My batter was the right consistency and I didn’t have the issues of it being too soft or too thick like last time.
Blog Recipes – Having a blog with recipes has been pretty popular for a long time. I went searching for more information because while Joshua Weismann does a great job of explaining shrimp tempura I also wanted to make vegetable tempura so I needed some further information. I found some great information from Just One Cookbook. I didn’t use all of the vegetables they mentioned, but I got myself to a point where I felt confident in moving ahead.
When I was done my tempura looked really good, but unfortunately it wasn’t as good as last week even. I went back to the recipe page, and scanned to try and see where I made a mistake, and I also went to chat gpt and asked what I did wrong. What I came up with is that my oil was too hot, the shrimp I bought was smaller than last week, so I probably cooked it too long, and I probably didn’t dry my vegetables enough before dipping them in the tempura batter. I think my learning sources went into this, but I am also someone who tends to go to fast and has to learn from my mistakes, so I am going to make these tweaks and try again in a couple of weeks!
Yum! It’d be great to hone this skill and make tempura all the time. I’m sure you’ll get the hang of it soon! While you are trial-and-erroring, are the products still fully edible?
They were definitely edible, just not as good as I have had in a restaurant :). We had them for supper though.