-If you go to high-end
tempura restaurants in Japan, they do each individual piece. They fry it, they serve it
to you, you eat it. So you're getting it
at the peak moment, the temperature
and the crispiness. [ Crunch ] That's good. [ Laughing ] Hi. My name is Takahiro Sakaeda. I am a chef partner
at Nami Nori, a Japanese temaki bar
in the West Village. And today I'm gonna show you
how to make tempura. First thing we're gonna do
is make the sausage. Dealing with tempura,
the batter is the last thing that we want to do,
so we want to set up everything, get our mise en place
put in place. Then the last thing we do is make the batter
and fry everything. Today going to make
two different sauces. One's a classic
tempura dipping sauce. Other one is a little bit
more contemporary. It uses soy that we serve
in our restaurant at Nami Nori. We're gonna go with
a very simple way today. So, hondashi and water,
and all we're gonna do here is just heat this up
to get all the hondashi melted. All right.
So three parts of this dashi. And then one part soy sauce. And to garnish this,
we're gonna grate some daikon to add a little bit texture
and some more flavor. What we want to do here
is after we grate this all, we want to put this through
kind of like just a strainer just to get rid of
any of the excess liquid. Ginger's a very strong flavor,
so it doesn't take much. And I'm gonna put together
the other sauce here. I have soy sauce here. This sauce -- some yuzu juice. So, yuzu is a type
of Japanese citrus. They do grow in warmer climates, so in California,
you might be able to find it. You know, it's kind of
in the orange family. And then we're gonna add
a little bit of mirin to this and just a little bit of sugar,
as well. And then after that, we're just
gonna bring this to a boil and slurry it just to
get it some consistency. Just starch and water
and slowly drizzle it in. You want to make sure
that it comes back to a boil before you add more because it might just turn into glue
on you. You don't want that. Fantastic. Along with
the other dipping sauces, what's great with tempura,
I think, is really about highlighting
the vegetable, and the best way to do that
is just with salt. Today, I'm just gonna have
some of this leftover nori. Gonna pulverize this
and create some nori salt. [ Whirring ] [ Laughs ]
Sounds like it's crying. [ Whirring ] Dehydrated yuzu skin
that's turned into a powder. Same thing here. Just mixing
this with a little bit of salt, kind of flavored seasoning,
yeah? I would say almost any vegetable
you can tempura. You don't want it to have
too much water. Tomatoes and cucumbers. It sounds kind of
a little weird in my head. It's not gonna get crisp, right? So, just in terms of
how we cut -- These potatoes, if you
make it thicker than this, it's gonna take too long
for it to cook, and your batter will end up
kind of burning on the outside. But then again,
if you make it too thin, you're gonna end up
just tasting batter. Asparagus is pretty simple, too. You know, if we go this way,
we can just go simply like this or you can kind of
put some incisions in here to fan this out. Just creates a little bit
of visual aesthetic here. Shiitake, too.
This is very simple, All we're gonna do
is just take these stems off. This is just shiso leaf. Squash blossoms. Obviously beautiful right now.
These are looking great. All we're gonna do for
these, we're just gonna
cut these in half. So, two different types
of nasu here. This is your Italian varietal. This is, like,
a Japanese varietal. Just taking the head off of here
and split this in half. And nasu actually
has a lot of water, too, a lot of moisture inside,
so you might see this pretty often where they
put these slits in here and they fan these out. This also allows
for the oil to contact and kind of get rid of the water
a little bit faster. Onions. If we skewer it, we can actually create layers
of this and separate the layers. We'll see how that
turns out later. [ Laughs ] The simple way to do carrots,
obviously, we can just cut them
into kind of batons, but we're gonna do
the kakiage style here with the onions
since we have both. Julienned carrots.
[ Laughs ] I've love cooking all my life. It actually started because
I just loved eating, right? And, you know, growing up, kind
of traditional Asian family. My mom was a housewife,
and she was always making dinner for us --
home-cooked meals every day. And, so, just in a rush
to eat faster, I'd always go into the kitchen
and, "Hey, Mom, can I help?" You know? I wasn't being nice. I just was -- I was hungry.
I wanted to eat. But, you know, I loved it, that feeling of, like,
someone caring for you and making you food
and, like, having that feeling. I want to give that
to people, too. Corn here.
Couple ways of doing this, too. Like, right at the edge of this,
if you can cut it right at the right spot
where you're cutting a little bit of the core,
it'll stick together, but you can see that it's very
difficult because you end up with a lot of waste,
but this piece right here, it looks like
it's attached here. But when you fry it,
it's like -- it's still soft. You don't really feel any of it. I think the easier way
is to just remove the kernels and then essentially
to make a corn fritter. Okay, so, now that we have
all the veg prepped out, we're gonna now move on
to the proteins. You know, this squid
is already kind of cleaned. I'm gonna just
cut this one open here just to expose the center
and just make sure that it's dry and clean
in the center, as well. You can always do the rings. When we think about tempura,
most common protein is shrimp. Obviously want to de-vein it,
remove the vein. And then on the bottom here,
I guess -- I call this the belly,
so on the belly side, just making
some small incisions here. And then flipping it
back onto the belly side and just gently pressing it
just to kind of break the joints so that we end up with, like,
a straight piece of shrimp here. There's generally water
inside the tail, so you always see people
talking about cutting the tail and removing the excess water
from there. Otherwise you might end up
with, like, an explosion from the tail, and it might
just explode on you, so... Whenever dealing with proteins,
I always like to season the protein directly,
but just very, very lightly. This will help to
kind of draw out a little bit extra moisture, as well. Those shrimps are pretty dry. These squids -- I'm gonna
give them a good press. All right.
And then now we're gonna make the batter and fry these up. Oil -- we want to set
this temperature at 335. With frying tempura
or frying anything in general, temperature control
is really important. If we drop down
to certain levels, that's when all the oil
goes into the batter and gets soggy. So we really don't want
to ever come below like 325. If you see your oil below there, you might have some
soggy situation going on. So now that everything is ready,
we finally want to get into the last stage
of making the batter. If you want to make
your own batter, essentially it's --
You're looking for a low-gluten wheat flour. This particular one,
We have a premixed one. Other important factors.
Cold, cold water. We got ice, ice water here. Cold water actually helps for it
to not mix with the flour. Another thing
about mixing the batter -- you may have seen other batters
or other things where they use a whisk
and they go crazy on it. I would say tempura batter,
it's pretty traditional. It's okay to have
some lumps in it. It's a good sign
that you haven't over-mixed it. But the easy way
is just to kind of test it. You can put it into oil. Test the temperature
of the oil that way, too. Wet things don't stick to wet.
Dry things don't stick to dry. So, generally,
if there's any kind of moisture on the outside,
we want to dredge it. This is just regular
AP flour here. Just using to remove
any moisture. Right now the batter
is looking pretty good to me. Now we're ready to tempura. So, one thing
you do want to have is a spider
or some sort of sieve. Any of this excess tempura
flakes -- want to remove. Obviously, sitting in here
for too long, it'll burn. The thing I'm focusing on here while I'm watching this
is kind of the bubbles. The bubbles is obviously
the moisture content in the actual vegetable itself.
When we first put it in, we're gonna see bigger bubbles,
and as this is continuing to cook, the bubbles
will get smaller and smaller. And after that, looking
for actual color of the batter. You know, I like to use
chopsticks personally because I can actually feel the crispiness of the batter,
as well. Sometimes you use a little bit
bigger tools like tongs, it's hard to get the sensation. When you lift this up,
you can actually feel the water vibrating and boiling inside. In the beginning,
it should be vibrating, but if it's not vibrating at
all, it means it's probably overcooked 'cause there's
no more water left. Once we take this
out of the oil, we want to season just very,
very gently right away. While it's still hot
and the oil's there, the salt will kind of
adhere to the oil. If you kind of wait
till it's all cold,
it's just gonna fall off. If you go to high-end
tempura restaurants in Japan, right, it's, like,
the omakase style where they do each individual piece,
they fry it, they serve it to you,
you eat it. And as I was thinking
about it, like, at home,
maybe it's too dangerous 'cause it's like 335-degree oil. [ Laughs ] Maybe not a good idea. Generally, like,
the skin side of the eggplant, you want to wipe it off so that you can kind of expose
the purple color. I'm just fanning it out
with my hands and holding it there for a
second and then letting it go. Very -- Very strange story. Like, honestly,
I thought all my life tempura was, like,
purely a Japanese creation, but the history behind it was that it's actually
Portuguese in origin. It was brought over into Japan,
and that's when Japan kind of took it over
and, you know, obviously created their own version.
The actual name is a Latin name, even though,
in the Japanese language, when you write things, generally
if it's a foreign word, you use a different set
of characters to signify that it's different. And so it was just
very deceiving to me when I found out
the history of tempura to find out
that it's not Japanese at all. Even the name is Latin,
from "tempora." It's, like, signifying the time in which they were fasting
from eating any meat. And so when you see tempura,
you never really see meat. It's only vegetables
and seafood. So this is it. ♪ Ta! ♪ This is all the hard work
we put in today, this tempura here... Got our corn fritters,
shiitake, our eggplants, shiso leaves, our
squash blossoms, our onions, our kakiage back here,
shrimp and squid. And our sweet potatoes
in the back. So, we got here our yuzu salt,
some nori salt. We have our yuzu soy. And this is our daikon oroshi
and ginger here. This is our tempura... I'm kind of classic. I like the traditional sauce
here, so... ♪♪ What we're really looking for
in tempura -- really looking for
light, crisp batter. Yuzu salt here
on the squash blossoms. [ Crunch ] Obviously,
the sound is important, right? You want to hear that crunch.
It's good. [ Laughs ] So, for anything
that we've done here today, if you were looking
for a recipe, just click the link down below,
and if you're ever in New York in the West Village area,
come see me. I'm usually there
at Nami Nori restaurant. Please. Thank you. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪
