Korea and Japan · Volume 52, The Koikuchi Line, the Kombu Coast and the Kaiseki Counter

Tempura

Name: Tempura
Total time: 30 min
Yield: Serves 4
Cuisine: Honshu and the Kansai-Kanto Spine
Ingredients: 100 g plain flour, low protein if possible; 200 ml ice cold water; 1 egg yolk; 400 g mixed prawns and vegetables (sweet potato, aubergine, shiso leaf, shiitake); about 800 ml, enough for roughly 3cm depth in the pan neutral oil and a little sesame oil, for frying; to taste grated daikon and tentsuyu dipping sauce, to serve

Nagasaki, by way of Kansai, elevated in Edo

Tempura, prawns and mixed vegetables in a pale, lacy fried batter: a shallow woven bamboo tray lined with white paper, holding freshly fried tempura, two curled prawns and pieces of sweet potato.

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: 30 minutes

Researched: No outside sources linked
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

Tempura arrived at Nagasaki in the sixteenth century with Portuguese Jesuit traders, its name traced to tempora, the Ember Days of the Catholic fasting calendar, and its earliest Japanese form, Nagasaki tempura, used a thick, egg and sake enriched batter far closer to the Portuguese peixinhos da horta tradition than to today's thin, ice cold batter, a lineage this atlas's Portugal chapter (EU-10) documents from the sending side of the same trade. The technique thinned twice on its way to Edo, first into Kansai's vegetable forward tsuke-age, then into Edo's own street stall version, sold skewered and fried to order alongside soba and sushi as one of "Edo's three flavours."

by Nagasaki, by way of Kansai, elevated in Edo

The Portuguese arrived at Nagasaki in the 1540s, and the technique they brought there changed Edo's food a century and a half before Edo mattered to the story at all. Firearms reached Japan through the same channel in 1543, and not long after, Portuguese missionaries and traders brought a fasting day frying method, tempora, tempora referring to the Ember Days of the Catholic calendar, when fish rather than meat was eaten, often fried in a thick, egg and sake enriched batter closer to Iberian peixinhos da horta than to anything a modern diner would recognise as tempura. This is the same Portuguese Jesuit trading network, and largely the same historical moment, that carried battered and fried fish technique into Portugal's own kitchen at Nagasaki's other end of the exchange, a crossover this atlas's Iberia volume on Portugal (EU-10) documents from the receiving side. The technique spread from Nagasaki to Kansai by around the seventeenth century, thinning into tsuke-age, and from Kansai on to Edo by the Anei era, 1772 to 1781 at the latest, where it became, alongside soba and sushi, one of "Edo's three flavours," a street stall food sold from skewers dipped in a shared tsuyu, illustrated in the Edo period scroll Kindai Shokunin Zukushi Ekotoba, held at the Tokyo National Museum. Tempura did not arrive in Japan as refined restaurant food. It arrived as a foreign fasting technique, was thinned and Japanised twice over on its way east, and only became elevated cuisine centuries after it was Edo street food, a genealogy worth stating plainly against any assumption that a dish this refined must always have been treated with the reverence it gets today.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 4. About 30 minutes.

Ingredients

100 g plain flour, low protein if possible
200 ml ice cold water
1 egg yolk
400 g mixed prawns and vegetables (sweet potato, aubergine, shiso leaf, shiitake)
about 800 ml, enough for roughly 3cm depth in the pan neutral oil and a little sesame oil, for frying
to taste grated daikon and tentsuyu dipping sauce, to serve

Method

Whisk the egg yolk into the ice water.
Add the flour all at once and mix with chopsticks, four or five strokes only, until just combined; lumps are correct, a smooth batter means overworked gluten (rung 3).
Heat the oil to 170 to 175°C; test with a dropped fleck of batter, which should sink briefly then rise immediately.
Dip each piece of prawn and vegetable and fry in small batches, turning once, one to two minutes, until pale gold and crisp; do not crowd the pan.
Drain briefly and serve immediately with grated daikon stirred into tentsuyu.

What a modern chef changes

The Kanto sesame logic, sharpened, and a controlled dip rather than a splash

Rungs 3, 6 and 1

Method

Use a genuine sesame oil blend, following Kanto's own historic reasoning that sesame oil's strong aroma was needed to mask and complement Edo Bay's oily, blue backed fish; a 20% sesame oil to 80% neutral oil blend gives real aroma without overwhelming delicate vegetables.
Build a proper tare-logic tentsuyu rather than a bottled sauce, dashi, mirin and soy reduced to the rung 6 discipline, so the dip itself carries the same deliberate ratio thinking the rest of this chapter's sauces do.
Extract the accompanying dashi at 60°C, per rung 1, for a clean, un-bittered base to the tentsuyu, tasting it on its own before the mirin and soy go in to confirm the kombu has not been over-extracted.

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