h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Works well with many veg - so long as you can cut them into a reasonable size. I've tried it with carrots, sweet potato, broccoli, spring onions. Parsnips would probably work quite well too. Any 'firm' vegetable should work.

Mix together equal quantities of self-raising flour and cornflour. Add enough cold water (ice cold if possible) to make a thick batter - but don't mix it too much. The odd lump of flour will add texture.

Cut your veg into pieces, roughly bitesized. The texture of the veg will play a part in determining how big you cut the pieces - you want the veg to just cook through in the same time the batter takes to get nice and crispy.

Coat the pieces of veg in the batter, and deep fry until crisp and golden.

If you use a true tempura batter, you should be able to use even the "flimsy" vegetables, like parsley or scallions or shredded carrots and onions.

I wish I could get my hands on a recipe for real tempura batter made from scratch; mostly you just find the mix at the supermarkets. I've seen tempura batter so light it barely coats the food and stays white, but gets nice and crisp and perfect... Mmmm, tempura.....

That is a real tempura batter recipe. Two 'tricks' to note though - the use of cornflour, and not beating all the lumps out. In fact, you can even mix the batter with a single chopstick.

I generally dip the veg in cornflour (not sieved, straight from the packet) then in beaten egg white, then cornflour, then egg white then cornflour. That seems to give fairly good results.

Oh yeah, you can also use large slices of peppers, that works quite well. I'd imagine chillis do too, though you might want to warn people.

Bez

What is it then that gives tempura such a distinct flavour?

I wouldn't mind knowing a good recipe for the sauce, though.... there's a Japanese restaurant near me that has the most excellent sauce... And they have good tempura, but they used to have even better tempura that they made from scratch (the batter, I mean.... I think there are a number of restaurants that get some sort of pre-fab batter, cuz a lo of places have tempura with the same qualiy and consistency, etc.)

'Course, I could also kill for a recipe for miso soup... I know the basics, but there are like six types of miso you can get at the supermarket and I don't know which I'm supposed to use....