Tempura'd

I took a Japanese street food class a few months ago, and have been wanting to make shrimp tempura for awhile now. The thought of deep frying seafood in my apartment was sort of filling me with dread though, as I hate the smell of fried fish, and my apartment is like a sieve of smells; it captures stuff forever in its little nooks + crannies. The smell of pumpkin bread I don't mind wafting around for weeks, but fried shrimp is another story. However, for whatever reason, I bought 10 jumbo shrimp at Fishtales on Court Street, and decided to get over my stinky apartment hang-up.

According to my Japanese cooking teacher, tempura is easy if you remember one thing. Always mix the egg (1) with the cold water (1 cup) before you add it to the cake flour (1 cup). Otherwise, if you don't, you will have gluey, icky tempura. Easy enough thing to remember. I also had some haricots verts in the fridge and decided to tempura those as well.

This is the first time in my life that I have purchased shrimp with its clothes still on, feet attached, with the purpose of deveining them on my very own. It was highly disgusting, and some of my shrimp had eaten a very large dinner before they died, because their little intestines were full of the grossest looking glop I have ever seen. But I soldiered on, only because I had visions of fried foods dancing around in my head.

After adding the half bottle of canola oil that I had in the cupboard to the pot, I read that the instructions called for 4 inches of oil for a proper fry. I only had 1 inch. I debated whether I really needed those other 3 inches and then determined, yes...I really didn't want to mess it all up after dealing with shrimp guts. So despite the blizzard outside, I ran across the street and bought two more bottles of cooking oil.

And it was so easy. I dredged the shrimp (after cross hatching the inside of each one, so that they would not curl up, but rather lay flat like mini corn dogs) in cake flour, dipped them in the tempura batter and dropped them into the hot oil. And they immediately puffed up like fluffy pillows. After I cooked all ten shrimp, I did the same thing with a giant handful of the green beans. And I have to say, the shrimp looked perfect and even tasted nice (crunchy and puffy, but a little oily), but the green beans were the piéce de résistance. Perfectly crunchy and then crisp cooked on the inside. Honestly, they were better than Red Cat's. I was shocked that I was able to pull it off. Moving forward, I am going to experiment with all sorts of stuff in the tempura batter. Green pea tempura is next.