Shrimp Tempura From Scratch - for sushi rolls or just to enjoy as delicious tempura

Welcome to my shrimp tempura tutorial. Today I'm going to show you how to make shrimp tempura from scratch that you can use for sushi roll making or just to make a delicious tempura dish. Now the most important part arguably about making tempura is the oil because whatever you fry something in is going to leave a thin film of flavor and tempura is very very delicate and very very subtle flavors so you don't want something that's overpowering or wrong or doesn't taste good or doesn't taste right. So it's very important to have clean oil and a two-oil system. The first part is a neutral frying oil and the second part is a small amount of a more flavorful oil. So for the neutral frying oil I recommend refined sesame seed oil. Now this can be hard to find so you can substitute that for grapeseed oil or sunflower seed oil or canola oil but like I said I recommend refined sesame seed oil. Now for the second part the part that adds flavor I would recommend toasted sesame seed oil this is a much more stronger pungent kind of sesame oil than the refined one and you can tell by the darker color and the strong aromatics. Now for a pot like the one I'm using in this video today that has five centimeters two inches worth of oil in it you want to use three to five tablespoons of toasted sesame seed oil. I went with four but you can experiment somewhere in that range just to see what you feel tastes better with your fried tempura. Okay now we covered that let's go straight into prep. Okay let's prepare the shrimp. First thing twist to take the head off and then remove all the shells and the legs and leave the last little tail part and once you've done that we're going to remove the intestinal sac. For that you take a fork and the last segment here you just pierce it in about half a centimeter in one-fifth of an inch and just pull it out softly and boom there you go dropped it. Here's the entire intestinal sac with poo you don't want that in your food. Now the tail it has a little bit of liquid inside these segments and if you fry it like this it will sometimes squirt a little bit oil at you and that's not very nice unless you like third degree burns. So let's take a knife and just scrape away the little liquid inside and a little bit of dirt and there we go that's ready for frying. Now when you fry it tends to curl up this is because of the muscle structure inside and you want to just take a knife and on the belly side you do five small shallow cuts spaced out equally and then you turn it around and you do this motion with your fingers like this. What happens is you feel a little pop every time you do this you want to keep doing it until you don't feel any more pops you'll know what I mean once you try this once and then you will have elongated and broken the structure inside the shrimp so it doesn't curl up. Now one last thing you just stroke it like this and it's ready to go. You can see we've made the shrimp a lot longer and it will not curl up like this. Okay so let's place it in some tissues and just dry it for 10 minutes you don't want a lot of moisture in the tempura and this will help with that. After that we're just going to take some flour and just dredge it in there, there we go, and dust off any excess and then we're ready to apply some batter to the shrimp. Okay now to make the tempura batter here are ingredients and the amounts. You're going to start with ice, ice cold water. I'm going to leave a little bit inside my jar here just for later to go balance it out. Add my yolk, whisk that in and then we're going to add the flour. Now at this point do not use a whisk, what I'm going to use here is some chopsticks that I haven't broken up from takeaway and it's important to use big objects because smaller objects will mix it together faster and you don't want that. When you're making tempura you want to keep it ice cold and you want to mix it the least amount possible so the gluten doesn't develop so you have a nice texture and crispiness to your tempura. So this is looking good, I'm going to add a little bit more of my water, now you add your ice to keep it nice and cold and you want to keep it at this consistency the whole time, so you add more flour and more water to keep it at this level as you're cooking because it will change over time. Now for the frying, you want to have super, super hot oil. I'm going to drop some tempura batter, you can see it sinks to the bottom and takes a while to come back up. This is not hot enough, it's important that you have super hot oil to fry your tempura to get it nice and crispy and always keep your oil clean, so whisk that out. As you can see here at a different temperature when I drop it in it pops right back up, that is the temperature you want to be frying at. It's at about 180 degrees Celsius. Okay so I'm going to remove this and then we're going to get to frying. So take your shrimp and just dip it into the batter and then let some of that drip off and then into the pan. Now I'm going to use a little swirling motion here as I drop them in. It creates a little bit more texture on the outside of your shrimp but if you have a big pot you can also just lay away from yourself in a quick motion, but in a small pot this swirling motion is very, very good. Okay so once I put a couple of my shrimp in here I'm going to again remove all these little crispy bits. Don't throw them away, they're great for adding into or on top of sushi rolls but they should not be in your oil because they'll oxidize the oil and dirty it. Okay so this is the tempura, it's looking pretty good. It should fry for about one to two minutes, don't overcook your shrimps, just get it to the point where it's nice and crispy and then remove it and get it dry. Here we go, put it on a drying rack and let it cool down for a little bit. Now I'm going to show you how to make some sauce. Okay let's make some tempura sauce. For that we're going to need some primary dashi, so here I'm putting 400 milliliters of water with a piece of kombu seaweed and we're just going to bring that together with some heat. Give it a little shake once in a while just to release some of that kombu flavor but as soon as it starts to simmer create little bubbles then we're going to remove the kombu so we don't overcook it. So here we go, at this point take the kombu away and add a hand of katsuobushi, this is dried bonito flakes and then we're going to remove it off the heat and just let it steep like a tea for five minutes just to let those flavors infuse a delicious umami and fishiness and it will just make a delicious fish stock. After that's done we're going to take a sieve, a cheesecloth and we're just going to strain it, so just pour that in there and let all the liquid pour through and remove those bits of katsuobushi. Okay and that there is your primary dashi stock, it's used for a lot of Japanese cooking. Now we're going to take 66 grams of mirin and we're just going to cook away the alcohol so just bring it to a simmer and as soon as it starts to come to a simmer then we can add our primary dashi that we just made into this and then we add 53 grams of soy sauce and then another hand of katsuobushi flakes, there we go. We really want to infuse this liquid with a lot of umami fishiness to make that tempura dipping sauce. So once it comes to a simmer again we're going to put the lid on it and let it steep again for five minutes, just let that all infuse again and then you guessed it we're going to strain it one more time. So here I've got the same cheesecloth, no point using more equipment, just the same one we'll do and just strain it through and that there is your authentic tempura dipping sauce. You just got one last little thing left, let's get some fresh daikon. I've got here a piece of freshly peeled daikon, big white radish and we're going to grate it just like this and then we'll grate it straight onto a sushi mat and the reason for that is we're going to press it just to get some of those juices out of it. You don't want to over press it to make it too dry, you still want it to be a bit damp so it comes together. This is the right texture right here, now we can use this to make our dipping sauce. So we take that, put a little pyramid in the middle of our dish right here, a little sauce dish and then we add our tempura sauce that we just made on top and that there is the perfect dipping sauce to accompany your tempura. So here's my tempura shrimp and I'm going to enjoy it now, delicious. Okay so there we go, you know how to make amazing tempura. Go out there, make your own tempura, use it for sushi rolls, make your own tempura dishes, just go wild. Now regarding the crunchiness, crispiness, some people like to over crispify their tempura by adding lots of extra batter to their frying. I'm not really a fan of that, I like just the one coat, just having that perfect and especially for sushi rolls when you have a lot of extra crispiness it's hard to close the sushi roll so it's better to have just one coat for that kind of stuff. But yeah if you wanted to have some more crispness on your tempura which is not what I'm recommending, just as you're frying it dip your hand in the batter and just drizzle it over it and just keep turning around keep adding some more of that. But like I said just like if you get the right coat it's just perfect. Okay so I hope you enjoyed this, I hope you learned something, share it, like it, thank you for watching, see you in the next one, goodbye!