Miyuki: artist/activist/explorer "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." - Anais Nin

Passport & Plate - Japanese kakiage tempura with traditional sauce

Japan | Wednesday, February 26, 2014 | 5 photos

Ingredients
Serving size 4-6 people or 24 medium-sized discs
Part I (Use what you have in your fridge and get creative! But if you want a more Japanese combination, these are some traditional kakiage ingredients I like together):
½ of an onion
1 long gobo (burdock root)
A handful of enoki mushrooms (or any other kind of mushroom)
1 carrot
2 small sweet potatoes

Part II: The Batter
6 tbsp of all-purpose flour
3 tbsp of katakuriko potato starch (or cornstarch)
½ tsp of salt
½ cup of ice cold water

Part III: The Sauce
? cup of stock
2 tbsp of mirin
2 tbp of soy sauce
½ cup of grated daikon radish
Grated ginger to your preference

Tools:
2 pairs of chopsticks: 1 for dealing with the oil and 1 for the batter
1 large ladle to create the discs of mixed vegetables
1 deep baking pan and a wire rack
Newspaper or telephone book paper to soak up the oil that drips out of the kakiage

 

How to prepare this recipe
As I mentioned in the recipe story, using leftovers will not only help eliminate wasting food, but it also brings together unexpected but often pleasantly surprising combinations. If you go that route, all you need to do is make the batter and sauce.

1. Wash the dirt off of the burdock and then use the back of your knife to scrape off the brown skin
2. Julienne everything and toss 2 tbsp of flour on it
3. Heat up your frying oil at low/medium heat
4. After mixing the dry batter ingredients, pour in the ice-cold water and mix lightly so that some flour pockets still remain (they create the crispy exterior layer)
5. Pour the batter over the vegetables and mix it again enough to coat the vegetables (add more flour if the mixture seems too runny; you want the batter to be closer to pancake batter)
6. To see if the oil is ready, throw a little piece of batter into the oil and see if it puffs up
7. Place a layer of the mixture onto the ladle with your batter chopsticks and slowly slide it into the oil horizontally
8. Repeat so that the remaining space of your pan isn’t too crowded
9. Once the edges start to turn golden, it’s time to flip the discs over and wait until everything gets a nice crispy golden brown. Try not to touch them too much while they’re hardening! You can then line them up against the walls of the deep baking tray on top of the rack vertically so that the extra oil can escape down.
10. Turn the heat down when you’re prepping your next batch and keep going until you run out of batter :)

To make the sauce:
1. Prepare/buy stock in advance (I use shiitake mushrooms and kombu seaweed)
2. Mix with other wet ingredients
3. Grate ginger and daikon and serve in separate dishes

I also like to eat kakiage on top of buckwheat noodles, which you can then put in the sauce with more stock. Serve it up in a bowl piping hot with the crispy kakiages, load it up with the ginger and daikon and you have yourself a classic homestyle Japanese dish!

 

The story behind this recipe
Every cuisine has a special place in its heart for fried food--Alabama fried green tomatoes, falafels of the Middle East, patacones of Latin America and of course Japan’s tempura. Kakiage is an offshoot of tempura, near and dear to my own heart as it is for many other Japanese people.

I grew up in a family with lineages spanning from Ireland and the UK on my dad’s side, to Japan on my mom’s. But like many of you, my taste buds are biased to the dishes made by the house cook--my mom, or okasan as I call her. Let me tell you a bit about okasan and the way she runs her kitchen. First of all, there’s usually at least five dishes at dinner that follow a system of Japanese traditional nutrition wisdom. Weekends are reserved for eating leftovers, but occasionally there are unfinished leftovers the next week. That’s precisely when we eat kakiage at okasan’s house. She just chops the leftovers up, coats them in batter and fries them into crispy goodness.

My friends always assume that just because I’m Japanese I must be eating tempura and sushi all the time. Reality couldn’t be more different since those foods are special restaurant treats. What’s more practical but equally delicious is kakiage, because it doesn’t let anything go to waste. It’s such a simple dish and yet as okasan explains to me, the simpler the dish, the harder it is to master it. I can attest to that, since mine always come out soggier than her crispy ones. One day!

Kakiage is objectively delicious. And yet, eating kakiage is one of those dishes that's just more than its taste. When I eat them, I get nostalgic about all of those Monday nights when I'd come downstairs to the sputtering of hot oil as okasan stood there wearing her checkered apron, yielding long, well-seasoned wooden chopsticks. More often than not, she'd be singing an old Japanese tune, only interrupted by her request that I grate the daikon and ginger. It's just one of those recipes that's wedged in my heart and my stomach.