Prawn and Vegetables Tempura with Rice

High calorie, high fat and high cholesterol lunch.... Tempura with rice. Unhealthy, but delicious - which is often the case with unhealthy food...;).

I like to use this recipe I found in Recipezaar to make my tempura, because the tempura coating turns out very crispy and stays so for a long time. It calls for (non-dark) beer and rice flour, but I omit the cayenne pepper and garlic powder, because these two ingredients are too overpowering - they make the tempura non-Japanese in taste. Instead I like to add a bit of oyster sauce to add some flavour to the tempura batter.

I also like to use instant tempura batter, the best one I've tried so far is the one from Ottogi, a Korean brand. When using instant tempura batter, I always use ice-cold water to make sure the tempura turns out crispy. I've tried making tempura batter with egg, but it was not as good as the non-egg tempura batter.

Ingredients

• 10 prawns
• 1 spring onion, cut into 5 cm long matchstick pieces
• 1 medium onion, sliced
• 1/2 cup cold beer /cold soda water
• 1/2 rice flour
• 1/2 tbs oyster sauce

Tempura Dipping Sauce

• 100 ml dashi stock
• 3 tbs soy sauce
• 2 tbs mirin
• 2 tbs sake
• 1 tbs sugar
  

What to do

• Whisk cold beer, oyster sauce and rice flour in a bowl.
  
• Coat the prawns and onions with flour before dipping them in the tempura batter mixture.
• Deep fry for 12 seconds.
  

And...being a sushi lover, here is my 2 cents - use your prawn tempura to make sushi too :)!




In Sydney, there are many small Sushi bars selling handrolls looking like the sushi rolls above for AU$1.80 each. I don't know if the rolls still cost the same now, or more expensive.