2024.03.18
"Tempura" is one of the representative dishes of Japanese food.
History of Tempura
Originally, this dish was established by arranging western-style fried foods from Portugal in the 16th century. By the way, vegetable tempura that has roots in vegetarian cuisine is sometimes called “shojinage”.
Koromo
Tempura is often cooked at home but “Tempura” fried by skilled chef at specialty restaurant is exceptional. By all means, it is a dish that foreigner who have visited Japan should eat. However, the problem for vegetarians and vegans is ingredients of “Koromo ” coating.
Koromo is made by mixing flour and eggs. Even commercial tempura flour uses egg yolk or whole egg. So, Vegan can not eat.
Don’t worry! For those who can not eat eggs, there are some Tempura restaurants which only use flour and potato flour to make Koromo in Tokyo.
The main ingredients for tempura are seafood such as shrimp, sillago(fish) and squid, and vegetables such as pumpkin, eggplant, lotus root and shishito. There will be no problem if you only choose vegetables.
Oil and Dipping soup
Basically, oil for Tempura is vegetable oil such as sesame oil or cottonseed oil and each restaurant has their own blended oil.
In general, Tempura is dipped in the sauce called “Tentsuyu” and eat. The basic recipe for Tentsuyu is soup stock, mirin, soy sauce and sugar. Since Mirin contains some alcohol, you may be careful. Recently, non-alcoholic mirin has been released but if you want to be safer, let’s eat with salt instead of Tentsuyu.
Nowadays, eat tempura with salt are common, so, some restaurants serve not only coarse salt or rock salt, but also salt mixed with matcha, sansho and truffle.
Please enjoy the taste.