National Tempura Day | Tempura Veggies & DJ Sushi Roll

It’s National Tempura Day! There is nothing quite like the crunch of a tempura treat. When I go out for sushi, I either always order a tempura roll, or I’ll request that a non-tempura roll be made tempura. It’s just so much better that way!

My favorite place to go out for sushi in Tampa is Takara Sushi & Sake Lounge. It’s definitely the sushi place I visit the most, not only for the food, but the service is some of the best ever. The owners, a husband and wife team, also take special care to get to know their customers and I can say that we have become friends over the past couple of months. 🙂

Takara was also gracious enough to open their doors to me on their closed day to work together on National Tempura Day. I wanted to showcase both their tempura shrimp and vegetable appetizer and my favorite sushi roll, the DJ. So Chef and I took to the Takara kitchen for a meal.

The first item to be made was the tempura shrimp and vegetables appetizer. The dish consists of shrimp, asparagus, sweet potatoes, mushrooms and carrots, lightly battered and flash fried.

Making tempura batter

Flash frying

Ta-Da!

Pretending like I work here.

I really did think making a tempura dish would be so much more difficult, but now I see that the process is relatively easy and the batter matters a lot. Takara, through their batter and their frying method, has a very light batter that allows the taste of the veggies and shrimp to come through, while still remaining very crunchy. It just goes to show that you don’t have to have a whole inch of tempura batter to get a really great crunchy effect. So batter light, people!

Here are some tips on batter and frying from Takara:

• Egg is usually found in batter, but Takara doesn’t use it because adding egg makes the batter a bit dense and people who are vegan or have dairy allergies cannot enjoy.
• Adding club soda to the flour mixture makes the batter lighter as opposed to using water.
• It’s important to keep the batter ice cold because the drastic change in temperature that occurs when you drop the ingredient in the hot oil causes it to crisp up much better.
• The ingredients are patted dry before dipping into the batter because otherwise, the batter will not stick well to the ingredient.

Next was the DJ Roll which is made with crab salad, avocado, cucumber and cream cheese, wrapped in soy paper and rice, and served panko style with eel sauce and yum yum sauce.

Creating the sushi roll

Fried, cut, done!

The sushi roll was so much fun to make, but it was not as easy as I thought, or as it looks! I followed along with my sushi roll, but I needed help a couple of times making it pretty and even across the roll. It was even hard to cut the roll into pieces! But, it was delicious and I loved this part. I would very much enjoy perfecting the sushi roll!

More tips from Takara for sushi making:

• Keep gloves damp.
• Wipe gloves/hands after using cream cheese because cream cheese is very sticky.
• Soy paper is very thin. Be gentle when padding rice on the soy paper and rolling it.

That’s it! This was such a fun holiday, working alongside owner Eugenia and her husband. Thank you to Takara for the support and help!

For my Tampa friends, Takara was generous enough to provide a $25 gift card to one lucky customer. Enter using the Rafflecopter below and good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway