Entente, we’ll say. :P
What toppings did you leave out of the udon noodle soup? It’s the sort of thing I could see on the table this weekend.
I agree completely. That’s some restaurant level tempura skills. No joke.
I was gonna go with chicken as the meat, with some enoki mushrooms, blanched spinach, some grilled tofu, maybe, and sliced carrots. Another common topping is decorative Japanese fish cakes–narutomaki, though I don’t have any. Alas.
Thanks, y’all! TBH I still wanna push forward more with this, but the addition of a great new mandolin slicer from my best friend is helping a lot in this regard. But thank you very, very much. That’s kind.
Speaking of mandolins… Skipper there is a great Pommes (potatoes) Anna recipe in the Beard book that you and your girlfriend should read cover to cover. It doesn’t take long and I enjoyed it. Beard defines techniques very well and revealed that I had many misconceptions/errors in what I was told, watched, or read that were …not quite right.
This is super simple, but I’ve been trying to add to my fried rice game lately. I make just plain fried rice for my son, and that’s fine for him. But I decided to try some other stuff for myself since I had some extra rice from a couple other dishes.
Since folks were talking about spam in this thread, I decided to try it. So I diced it up and seasoned it minimally, added some green beans, and then added the rice and fried it as normal. A little soy sauce, then everything to the outer edge of the pan as I put in the egg.
I really like where this is going. I think some pineapple. Maybe cashews. I don’t know. Lot’s of ways to go.
-xtien
Pineapple works well there. “Hawaiian” fried rice (pineapple and spam) is in our regular rotation.
Depending on your tolerances, you should try adding some fish sauce and/or chili (sambal, etc).
I am gonna unleash my grand fried rice secrets (admittedly for a Japanese/hibachi style):
Use some sushi-style Japanese rice (a medium grain variety like Koshihikari), day old and refrigerated, as all the legends say
Use an absolute shit ton of butter to fry with
All else remains equal: you can flavor w/ scallions (white parts), ginger, and/or garlic upfront, sliced onions and harder veg and meat (I, too, am a huge fan of Spam in fried rice), softer veg, then rice, then soy and maybe a bit of sugar and black pepper, then push to sides and scramble an egg.
It’s as close as I’ve gotten to my favorite restaurants. It’s still not gonna compare to the wok hei infused Chinese diner style stuff, no, cuz I mean, you’re not blasting your rice over a 200,000 BTU jet engine like they do. But it works nonetheless :)
What changed my life in terms of making fried rice was a simple explanation of fried rice from some Hawaiians, who eat fried rice with like… Every meal. And really, fried rice is awesome breakfast food. But I digress.
Here’s what fried rice is:
Stir fried stuff, that you add cooked rice to at the very end. You are basically just throwing the rice in at the end to warm it up.
You aren’t actually cooking the rice.
Now, to be fair, there are other ways to do it, but you need crazy high heat. Otherwise, the rice will just get mushy and break down. Part of the reason for what Armando suggested, about using day old refrigerated rice, because it will start off hard and won’t cook much.
I once saw a trick on iron chef, when kenichi mixed beaten eggs in with fresh rice, coated it all, and then stir fried it on high heat. He couldn’t use old rice due to the time limits. The effect was supposedly amazing… I’ve tried it, but it was hard to pull off without high heat.
Anyway.
Stirfry
Add cooked rice
Also, I concur with the suggestion of spam, and concur that a mountain of butter will make it taste good.
Will do, I have some potatoes around the house so perhaps even this weekend. We’re drying to retry the pasta again from Lidia’s book. I think mentioned over in the santa thread, my GF is part Italian. She loves all things pasta, and although helped her grandma and mom make it when she was young, she hasn’t done that much as an adult. I’ve loaded her up with tons of tools after she read more of that book. Besides the mixer and pasta roller we had, she now has drying racks and an extruder. I cannot wait to have some of the stuff she’s about to try.
A long time ago, I read a bit about omelets that noted: all you ingredients (bacon, mushrooms) should be fully cooked before you add them to your omelet. Your omelet has enough things to worry about with cooking the eggs. It can’t also cook your fillings.
I think of fried rice the same way, but the rice is the eggs. When assembling the fried rice, everything needs to be fully cooked, and all you’re worrying about is the rice.
That’s why leftovers are the thing that you usually add to fried rice (in addition to the rice itself being left over). Leftovers are fully cooked.
That broccoli and cauliflower gratinate from Lidia’s book is delicious. That book is also what I used for my Thanksgiving bolognese. And, you gotta do the risotto and, and, and, omgomgomg! /headexplodes
So my son loves squash. Loves it so much he often requests it, and will be happy to eat nothing but squash for dinner.
So I decided to use a butternut squash and make mac and cheese. I also had enough left that I roasted up some with apples and pecans. Add in smoked pork chop and it was a grade A dinner.
Just boil up the squash with chicken stock and rosemary, cook the pasta. Drain all but 1/2 cup of liquid from the squash, put in blender, add some garlic that you sautéed up in olive oil, and add half a cup of milk and blend until smooth. Pour over pasta in a baking dish, mix in shredded cheddar and bake. Top with cheddar and bake for 5 minutes to finish.
The talk of fried rice made me make some.
The result was quite a non traditional, but very good, result.
I started with some left over basmati rice, from a company called Royal. I recently got a ten lb bag of it after hearing good things, and it’s really very good. Super long grains.
This isn’t what would normally go in fried rice, but I like it. The result of using this is that the texture is more like a biryani. Which is fine.
I had some andouille which was past the use by date by a few days, so I didn’t want to let it go any longer and used it. This worked fine, as the garlic and other flavors in it worked well with the fried rice.
Other various vegetables, some Szechuan pepper corn, oyster sauce, soy sauce, hot pepper… end result was a good weird fusion thing of Indian, Cajun, and Chinese.
Random Japanese-adjacent things tonight:
Miso soup, simmered overlong :). Lazy dashi stock (from granules), firm tofu, wakame seaweed, green onions, and plenty of white miso paste. Salty, warm, perfect.
Randoplatter!
Tempura-fried shrimp; the last of my tempura veg from last time (so some zucchini and sweet potato); some hibachi-style fried rice with egg, soy sauce, butter, and sesame seeds; and some hibachi style veggies (onion, zucchini, and mushrooms) with the same. Plus a saucer of tempura dipping sauce made with a dashi stock base, plus soy sauce and mirin.
Tasty, albeit heavy night.
If all goes well tomorrow, half my leftovers will go into a plate of omurice (a fried rice dish with a kitchen sink’s worth of proteins and veg flavored with soy sauce and ketchup–yes, ketchup!–folded into a velvetty omelette and served with a drizzle of soy-infused ketchup). The other half will go into a Japanese-inspired faro salad with, well, faro, onions, spinach, mushrooms, carrots, cabbage, and teriyaki chicken, topped with green onions and shredded nori. Fingers crossed that it doesn’t suck.
@Timex Royal brand Basmati is excellent. I also love Tilda. The fried rice looks lovely, tbh :)
Dude … seriously, these pics of food, hell, your whole meal could be pics on a menu at a nice japanese restaurant. But I keep saying this, your tempura frying and breading is amazing. I look at that and imagine how crispy that actually is. I want tempura shrimp like that. Heck, I want to be able to bread and fry like that.
I don’t even know how to do tempura, but I’ll try to post my crappy fried food pics sometime and let you understand what I’m talking about.
Do you pan fry? Deep fry? What kind of oil, what temp, etc?
Thanks, seriously man. That is a deeply encouraging post to read this morning :)
Tempura isn’t too bad, all things considered. Getting it just right is tough, though. I seriously am still working on it. It photographs very well, but I always find things I’d like to improve.
For this batch, I went with:
1 cup AP Flour
1 tsp Baking Powder
1 Large Egg
~1 cup Ice Water
1lb Large, Peeled, De-Veined Shrimp
Cornstarch
Corn Oil for frying
Mix together the flour and baking powder, then separately, the ice water and egg. You can chill the flour mixture in the freezer for awhile if you wanna get really serious. Cold batter == lower gluten formation and thus more tender, crisp coating. Meanwhile, cut slits into the bottoms of the shrimp and then stretch them out by hand, “popping” the ligaments (?) in the back to straighten them. Cut the tips of the tails off and press the water out with a knife or your finger to prevent sputtering. Then dust them with cornstarch. Heat the oil to 350F in a deep fryer (or at least a deep enough layer of it in a regular pot/wok to submerge).
You can see my straightening didn’t entirely take–may have needed deeper slits or maybe more aggressive “popping,” Damn.
Anyway, right before you fry, mix together the batter. Add most of the water at first and beat it in. Try not to overmix and check texture. It should be fairly thin–moreso than, say, corndog batter or pancake batter, though probably not quite as thin as crepe batter. Add more of the water/egg mixture to achieve that level of thinness as needed.
Dunk the cornstarch-tossed shrimp into the batter, holding them by the tail. Let it drip for 10 seconds or so, shaking gently, then put the end of the shrimp into the oil. Because I use a deep fryer with a basket that battered foods love to stick to, I hold the shrimp by the tip of the tail in the oil for 10 seconds or so until the batter’s fried enough not to stick when I let go. My knuckles are covered with tiny burn marks thanks to all the tempura frying I’ve done here lately :(
For extra crispness, fry about 1, 1.5 minutes until just barely done and the batter is still quite pale. Remove from the oil, let cool slightly (maybe 5 minutes) on a paper-towel lined rack, then add back in for another 45-60 seconds to crisp it up and darken the batter to light gold. Remove to the rack again and then serve hot.
Tempura veg in the exact same batter, cooked according to the vegetable in question’s needs. The ones pictured above are slightly unfair–they’re last week’s tempura veggies warmed up in the toaster oven for a few minutes, which got the breading darker and crisped up again from the fridge, but sadly kinda overcooked the zucchini in particular.
And I write all that despite it not being perfect. The stuff you make like the above needs to be eaten quickly. Unlike, say, Korean Fried Chicken, which uses potato starch to maintain crispness for a very long time, this stuff will eventually go a little soggy from steam coming from the food within the breading. However, I think the kind of brittle crispness of potato starch batters wouldn’t be very visually appealing or have the right mouthfeel. Next time I might try a 50/50 or 25/75 mixture of potato starch/flour.
So, my foray into frying landed me a countertop unit with a basket, probably similar to yours. You set it by temp. By chance do you know what you’re setting yours for?
I also use peanut oil, can certainly switch to veg, but I don’t know how much that imparts flavor and/or if that’s why I get darker fried foods when I do fry. I know a lot has to do with my breading, but as an example, when I make fried chicken or similar, even at minimal fry times it comes out dark. Perhaps I’m going too hot on the oil.
When I have made batter for frying, I fucked it up royally, so your tip on easing the item into the oil (and not at the bottom/sides of the basket) are very good to know. Breading and batters in frying run a very large gamut of knowledge. They seem simple, but they haven’t proven to be, so far.
As for burning your knuckles … why not put them in with chopsticks or tongs?
Sorry, that info was hidden in a large paragraph above. 350 is what I’m using for this stuff. I usually do 325/360 for stuff like fries and Korean fried chicken that gets a double-fry like I mention above, but I find the lower temp makes the batter for tempura very soggy and oily, so I split the difference and just fry (briefly) twice at 350.
I do use peanut oil when I can afford it, and don’t find a significant difference in flavor, though I know it’s got more taste to it than some more neutral oils.
Old oil that’s had a lot of stuff fried in it will eventually lead to darker frying and, if I recall, has other interesting (and not necessarily good or bad) properties, like slightly softer final products at slightly higher temps, or something like that. I forget where I read the info. But basically as the oil oxidizes more and more, its frying properties change. I usually use mine for a good long while cuz I’m lazy and cheap :)
That’s what an intelligent and dextrous person would do. I am neither ;-)
But seriously, I watch the actual Japanese cooks dunk the shrimps in holding the tails with those big “cooking” chopsticks, but I just can’t get the hang of them, and my tongs don’t clamp tight enough to hold onto something as narrow and slippery as a shrimp tail. For the tempura veg, since there’s no natural “handle,” I try not to use tongs because doing so usually results in a “ring” of missing batter where the tong was pushed against it. So I just use my hands there, too. The little zucchini chips in particular are dangerous :)
Frying is definitely a weirdly specific and subtle art. I’ve had this same fryer model for years and years and am still learning new things about the process.
edit: just barely visible at the side there is the pretty glass bottle @Moore / @_Moore got me a couple of years back where I keep my general purpose cooking oil (canola). I put one of those pouring spouts into it and it works perfectly :-D
The tempura looks great. It’s hard to master. I’m certainly far from it myself. Since I don’t have a fryer, we don’t do it that often, only when the mood strikes (which is probably only every 6 months).
Cake flour seems to be the secret ingredient for me. Keeps the gluten even lower. I’ve also read of people mixing in cornstarch into the batter itself to help inhibit the gluten formation. But I don’t really like the flavor of cornstarch if it’s used that heavily.
I think you’re miscrediting things. I’ve never given anyone on this board anything physical. :p