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Jodie’s tried and tested recipes #3
Japanese kakiaage
These Japanese seafood and vegetable fritters are a lot easier to make than they are to pronounce, and they taste great! What, did you really think I’d give you the recipe for fugu sashimi? I don’t want you lot going off, eating poisonous pufferfish and carking it before you’ve bought book 4…
So anyway, I love Japanese food. Everyone thinks it’s all raw fish and karaoke with noodles, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Crispy and mildly spiced karaage chicken, ebi furai – deep-fried prawns in panko breadcrumbs, pan-fried teriyaki tofu… Japanese food is varied and delicious. Well, the savoury stuff is, anyway. I was originally going to find a nice Japanese cake or sweet recipe to finish off my adventure this time, but it didn’t end well.
Anyone who’s watched The Great British Bake Off will have seen several of the contestants use matcha powder, so I went in search of this exotic (and achingly trendy) ingredient. Matcha is green-tea powder, and the Japanese use it for all sorts of things. For starters, they drink it (‘tea’ in Japan doesn’t come with milk and two sugars. Heresy!), and they add it to all kinds of desserts, not just cakes but ice cream and mousse too. So on a trip back to London to visit some friends, I took Daisy to a fancy Japanese bakery (nothing like that here in Penstowan, or even in the cosmopolitan metropolis that is Truro). We chose a layered matcha crepe cake and a matcha cheesecake. Both looked absolutely amazing (and cost a flipping fortune). We both tucked in eagerly. The taste was strangely evocative; it brought back memories of the time I fell off my bike in the park when I was kid, and face planted on the ground with my mouth open, because both of them tasted like eating grass. Happy days.
So, a savoury dish it is, then! These fritters are deep fried in crispy tempura, a light batter that you can actually use to coat loads of different things. You can even do your Friday fish and chips in it. Or Mars bars, if you’re that way inclined (or Scottish).
Coarsely chop 7 or 8 medium-sized peeled, de-veined raw prawns – you want some nice little chunks, so don’t chop them too finely or they’ll get lost in the batter, and nobody wants to lose their prawns. Cut 1 carrot into matchsticks, or you can use sweet potato, courgette, or even a broccoli stalk – the bit that everyone throws away. You could use a mixture of these if you wanted to. Do what you like. I ain’t your mum.
Thinly slice an onion and a shallot (or you could use a couple of spring onions instead) and combine them with the other ingredients.
For the tempura batter, mix 1/2 cup of plain flour with 2 tablespoons of cornflour. Make a well in the centre and add 1 egg yolk and 1/2 cup of iced water, and stir until just combined. The traditional way is to stir it with a chop stick, and leave it a bit lumpy, but that goes against the grain for me and I have to beat it until it’s smooth. Add the chopped veg and prawns and stir them in until they’re just coated.
To deep fry, you’ll need a depth of around 5cm of oil in a saucepan, heated to 170ºc. You’ll know it’s hot enough if you chuck in a cube of bread and it sizzles (the way my bits do when Nathan kisses me) and quickly turns golden brown (my bits don’t do that). Drop 1/3 cupfuls of the mixture in to oil, making sure you get a good mix of ingredients in each one; you don’t want a cup full of batter, because it’ll just taste like a deep-fried Yorkshire pudding – which actually sounds quite nice, but isn’t Japanese. Fry on each side for 2-3 minutes until golden brown and crispy, then drain on kitchen paper while you cook the rest. The first one is usually a bit soggy because the oil is never quite as hot as you think it is. Or maybe that’s just me? Anyway, it’s a good excuse to eat it while you cook the others, because of course you don’t want to serve anyone else something that’s under par…
These kakiaage (and no, I don’t know how you pronounce that. I think it’s kaa-key-ah-hay, but don’t quote me on that because it could be wrong and I will deny it) are great on their own or served with a dipping sauce. Nathan likes them with sweet-chilli sauce, but that’s probably because it’s hot and sweet (and tasty), just like him…
Acknowledgments
These things get harder to write every time! Not because I did it My Way (cue music) or all on my own — far from it — but because I thank the same people over and over again, and quite frankly I owe them so much that it’s beginning to get embarrassing.
I’d like to be able to say, ‘thanks, you know who you are’, but that just won’t cut it, because these wonderful people deserve public recognition.
First and foremost, my husband Dominic and son Lucas. You two are the apples of my eye, the ying to my yang, the icing on my cake, and I love you. You have supported me (financially, emotionally, and probably even physically on occasion), and I am more grateful than you can imagine. Dominic, I hope to one day be so massively successful that I can tell you to quit your job and go and play golf all day. But for the moment you might just have to settle for some new balls (as it were). Lucas, I could win the Booker Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature and be chosen for the Richard and Judy/Oprah Winfrey/Reese Witherspoon book clubs*, and you would STILL be my greatest achievement.
I am also lucky enough to
