Wagamama Week: Yasai Korroke

At last! A successful recipe - something I might try again! Shame the ingredients list will be the longest I have ever posted :) I have given up revising their quantities in the ingredients list, and just written the ones that I used. For once the original recipe didn't make enough food, and while I'm willing to try making too much, I'm not willing to go hungry for the sake of following the recipe!

Ingredients:
Amai sauce:

• 1tbsp malt vinegar
• 3 tbsp sugar
• 1 tbsp light soy sauce
• 1 tbsp dark soy sauce
• 1 1/2 tbsp tomato ketchup
• 2 tsp tamarind paste

Salad dressing:

• 1 tsp finely chopped shallot
• 1/2" piece of fresh ginger root, peeled and grated
• 1 tbsp rice vinegar
• 1/2 tbsp tomato ketchup
• 50ml vegetable oil
• 1 1/2 tbsp light soy sauce

Vegetable cakes:

• oil for deep-frying
• 2 large potatoes
• 1 medium sweet potato
• 50g frozen peas
• 75g tinned sweetcorn, drained
• 1 small onion
• 1 red chilli
• 3-4 tbsp plain flour
• 1 egg
• 75g fine breadcrumbs

Salad:

• half a bag of mixed salad
• 1/2 red pepper
• 10g dried wakame

Microwave the vinegar, sugar and soy sauce until the sugar has dissolved, then whisk in the rest of the amai sauce ingredients and set aside to cool. In a separate bowl, whisk together the salad dressing ingredients and set aside as well.

Peel and chop the potatoes, and sweet potatoes. Boil the potatoes for 12 minutes; add the sweet potatoes after 3-4 minutes so they are done at the same time. Drain very well, and cover with a teatowel to absorb the moisture. When reasonably dry, mash roughly with a fork, then stir in the peas and sweet corn and set aside to cool.

Meanwhile, peel and finely chop the onion, and trim and deseed the chilli (or leave the seeds in, if you like the kick). Fry in a few tbsp of vegetable oil at a low heat, until soft and fragrant. Stir into the potato mixture. Using your hands, form the mixture into small cakes, and then dip into the flour, the egg, and then the breadcrumbs, and deep-fry at 180C for 4-5 minutes until crisp and golden. If the cakes are too fragile, chill them for an hour and then fry them slightly longer.

Meanwhile, finely-slice the red pepper and rehydrate the wakame. Toss with the salad leaves and dressing, then serve the cakes on top of the salad.

Verdict:
Ahh, this was a breath of fresh air. Crisp, delicate vegetable cakes that were surprisingly light and more complex than the sum of their parts. A salad dressing that looked thoroughly unappetising and unbalanced, but shined when combined with the crisp red pepper and earthy seaweed. I couldn't keep track of the quantities I adjusted this time: they suggested 50g of dried wakame go into the salad... that would be like one of the serving bowls entirely filled with wakame. And while this recipe nestles happily in the middle of the vegetarian main meal section, where the recipes seem balanced for 3-4 people despite being advertised for two, the original would only just have fed one. Strange book; it's like they went into the kitchens and tried to guess what quantities of raw ingredients went into each meal, rather than asking one of the chefs.

Deep-Fried Rice Vermicelli

Katsudon

This is one of my favourite Japanese dishes; I often order it in restaurants because it's the sort of thing I figure would be fiddly to make at home. But after buying the deep-fat-fryer, I wanted to give it a try! I followed this helpful youtube video, and made a couple of slight changes for my kitchen and tastes. Also I served it with some stir-fried pak choi with garlic and sesame oil, so that I would have some greens with it. Still very much a treat of a recipe, I'd balloon if I ate it every night :)

Ingredients

• 300g pork fillet or loin, cut into two big pieces, or two deboned pork chops 
• plain flour
• 2 eggs
• 1 fat slice of bread, whizzed into breadcrumbs
• white rice
• half a white onion
• 300ml hot water
• 3 tbsp soy sauce
• 1/2 tsp fish sauce
• 1/2 vegetable stock cube
• 2 tbsp mirin or cooking wine
• 1 tsp raw or demerara sugar

Set your white rice cooking according to its packet instructions. Lay the pork out on a breadboard and cover with a plastic bag. Beat with a rolling pin until 1cm thick or less all over. Put a few tbsp of flour on a plate, put the breadcrumbs on another one, and break an egg onto a final one, whisking gently with a fork to break up. Dip the pork in the flour, then the egg, then finally the breadcrumbs, shaking off any excess at each stage. Deep-fry at 180 C for 8-10 minutes, until the breadcrumbs are golden and the pork is just pink in the middle.

Meanwhile, peel and finely slice the onion into half-moons. Break the remaining egg into a small bowl. Put the rest of the ingredients in saucepan and bring to a simmer, then add the onion. Cook for ten minutes, until the onion is soft and the pork has finished deep-frying. Take the pork out of the deep-fryer and lay it out on a (clean!) breadboard. Slice it thickly, diagonally, then use a spatula to transfer the whole thing to the saucepan with the stock and onions. Drizzle over the egg and immediately cover. Simmer for one minute, then use a big spatula or slotted spoon to serve the whole thing atop a mound of freshly cooked white rice. Pour over the onion and egg sauce. YUM!

"Thai" Beef Salad on Deep-Fried Rice Noodles

I already covered my "Thai" Beef Salad in another post; tonight was very similar but with a whole bunch of fresh long radishes instead of tomatoes, and sweet chilli sauce instead of a real chilli as the SO has a painful mouth ulcer. One thing I finally got right was deep-frying the rice vermicelli. Often I just soak this in some hot water and then toss around in a stir fry, but I've had some success frying it and getting it to puff up. However as I don't usually have many litres of oil lying around the kitchen, I'm always tended to use less oil than I should, and usually in a wok since that's what a lot of recipes recommend.

Tonight I thought that the main thing that's made it difficult in the past is the shallow level of oil, as some parts puff up and push other parts out of the oil, so you end up frying them longer than you should, the oil burns, and some parts fry shut before puffing up. So... why am I using a giant bowl of a pan with a flat gradient? That's crazy!

So I heated up my smallest, heavy-based saucepan, and added about 200ml of vegetable oil. I flattened out a handful of loops of vermicelli and the SO dropped them into the pan. The first nest fried so quickly, that the entire pan was suddenly full of puffed rice noodles, all in a big nest that could easily be removed. Success! They were absolutely perfect, very light and crackly, and the oil was completely clean afterwards so we'll happily use it again. One day maybe I'll own a proper deep-fryer, but until then, I'll use a deep layer in a hot pan, set well back on the stove :)

Tempura

Tempura are the lighly and fluffy deep-fried batter-coated vegetables and seafood often served as a starter in Japanese restaurants. As my dad sadly observed, now that we can make them so well at home, we no longer need to go out to eat them! There are a few tricks to cooking them, which we have perfected over the years:

• The batter should be barely combined, not whisked until smooth, so that the gluten does not become tough;
• The batter should be kept cold, preferably suspended in a bowl of ice and water;
• Slice the vegetables so that they evenly cook, i.e. have similar thickness all over;
• Some vegetables benefit from being 'flowered' so that the batter clings better;
• The oil should be at least the depth of the size of your vegetables;
• The oil should be about 190 C; if you don't have an oil thermometer, a cube of bread should take 10 seconds to go crisp and golden;
• A rack over the wok helps to drain the oil back into the pan for re-use.

Making cuts in the courgette pieces
so the batter clings better

Tonight we used sweet potato for the first time; cut to a half cm thickness, they cooked beautifully and were sweet and tasty. We bought a single medium-sized squid from the fishmonger and sliced the body into rings, and the tentacles and the fins into a few chunky pieces.

We also used courgettes; I decided to try a new way of cutting them as I had had poor results with them in sticks or slices before. I topped and tailed them, sliced them lengthwise, scooped out the seeds, sliced them lengthwise again, and then across into four pieces, making 16 flattish pieces from the single courgette. Then I took a small sharp knife and cut small triangles out along the edges, so that the pieces came out like little combs or fern leaves. This made the batter cling better, cook a little faster, and of course was rather pretty!

Sweet potato and courgette tempura

The batter should be made in a 1:1 ratio of flour to water, which should be ice-cold. If you use sparkling water, you should either defroth it somewhat, or leave the batter to rest for half an hour so some of the bubbliness is gone. If you use it straightaway, sometimes all the carbonation coes out at once, and in the resulting explosion the batter can become separated from the vegetables! Our Japenese cooking book demands 'tempura flour'; when I looked up what this consists of, it is just any plain white wheat flour - preferably a finely milled one for lightness. Nowadays this means any plain white flour from the supermarket will do perfectly fine.

When making the batter, the flour and water should be combined in a few swift strokes, with a butter knife or a pair of chopsticks. Don't use a fork, as it will fill up with flour and you'll end up overmixing the flour as you try to get the goobery bits out. Stop stirring the flour and water together as soon as you can no longer see any dry flour; don't worry if there are small lumps as they'll work themselves out. You can leave the batter to rest, or not; we've not found that it makes any real difference. Just make sure it stays cold.

Squid tempura

After all this preparation, making tempura is simple. A few at a time, drop your vegetables into the bowl of batter, moving around the pieces to make sure they are well coated. Lift a piece out with a pair of tongs, shake off any large excess of batter, then place gently in the hot oil. Cook only a few pieces at a time to avoid dropping the oil temperature too low. Remove to a rack suspended over the wok and then to a bowl lined with paper towel. Ideally, serve immediately, but even when preparing as a side for just four people, you will probably end up with a few soggy ones at the bottom. Maybe there's a good reason to go out to eat tempura every so often, after all :)