Recipe: Kabocha (pumpkin) tempura

Pumpkin tempura: no small fry

Tempura is a deceptively simple dish. After all, it’s just seafood or vegetables coated in batter and deep fried. How could you go wrong?

The answer turns out to be ‘rather easily’. Make the batter too thick and result is a moist, gluey texture worlds apart from tempura’s signature crispiness. Make the batter too thin and you needn’t have bothered with it in the first place. Then there’s the oil. If the temperature’s too high, it burns. Not hot enough, you’re eating oil slick.

The basic idea for preparing batter is 1:1 (powder:water). To ensure your tempura has the right crispy texture, add a little baking powder or corn starch to the batter. It’s also important to use cold water, and that you mix your batter roughly. Adding an egg gives the tempura a nice color, but be sure to only use the yolk so as to retain the batter’s crispiness.

A final word of advice: eat the tempura as soon as it is served. Even perfectly cooked, this is a dish that won’t keep long.

Ingredients (serves 2)

• 150 g pumpkin
• 3/4 cup of wheat four (sifted)
• 1 teaspoon of corn starch
• 3/4 cup of cold water

Method

Remove the pumpkin’s seeds and slice into 1 cm pieces.

Mix 3/4 of a cup of wheat flour and a teaspoon of corn starch with 3/4 of a cup of cold water (refrigerate the water beforehand or add ice cubes to room temperature water). Mix roughly.

Place a deep-fry dish with roughly 5 cm of vegetable oil on a medium heat so that the oil reaches 160 degrees Celsius.

If you drop a little batter into the oil, it should sink to the bottom of the dish and then quickly float up to the surface.

Put the sliced pumpkin into the batter cover both sides.

Deep fry each piece of pumpkin for 1 – 2 minutes. Prod each piece of pumpkin with chopsticks to check the batter feels crispy. Turn each piece over so that both sides are cooked evenly.

Remove the pumpkin from the oil and place on a draining tray.

Sprinkle 2 – 3 pinches of the salt over the tempura and serve.