The first article on tempura covered where it came from and why the batter is lumpy. This one is about the craft: what goes into the oil and when, how the ingredient is prepared before it gets there, what “frying” is actually doing to it, how the temperature and the seconds are managed, what you put on it afterwards, and where the form is heading now that a handful of chefs have taken it apart and rebuilt it.
It is written for someone who wants to eat tempura well, at a counter, and understand what they are watching. Where a working chef’s numbers are quoted, they are attributed.
What goes in: a calendar, not a menu
A serious tempura counter does not have a fixed list. It has a season, and within the season a region. The word for an ingredient is tane — the same word used at a sushi counter — and the chef’s job starts with choosing them.
Spring is the mountain. Sansai, wild mountain vegetables, arrive in a short window from March: fukinoto, the butterbur bud, bitter enough to make people wince and then order it again; tara no me, the shoots of the angelica tree, which are the single most sought-after tempura ingredient of the year; kogomi fiddleheads; udo. Bamboo shoot, rapeseed blossom. From Suruga Bay, the spring sakura ebi run — tiny pink shrimp landed only at Yui in Shizuoka, fried as a lacy kakiage fritter. And the first small sweetfish, chi-ayu, fried whole.
Summer is the bay. In Tokyo it is kisu, the sillago, a small silver fish that is the definition of Edo-style tempura: butterflied down the back, fried for about a minute, white and sweet. Anago, conger eel, at its best in summer, the Tokyo Bay fish that defines the counter. Megochi, a flathead. In Osaka and Kyoto, summer means hamo, the pike conger, which cannot be eaten without a specific and famous piece of knife work (below). From the fields: myoga ginger buds, sweetcorn, Kamo nasu — the round Kyoto aubergine — and manganji peppers.
Autumn is the forest floor and the second sea. Matsutake, briefly and expensively. Maitake. Ginkgo nuts, threaded on a pine needle. Chestnut. The sweet potato, which one chef in Ginza turned into the most famous single piece of tempura in the country (below). The autumn sakura ebi run in Suruga Bay, late October to December. And the shrimp: kuruma ebi, the Japanese tiger prawn, available year-round from farms but at its best now.
Winter is the cold water. Oysters, which fry better than almost anything. Shirako, cod milt, which becomes a custard inside its shell of batter and is the piece regulars wait for. Scallop. Kobashira, the small adductor muscles of the surf clam, fried as kakiage — the classic Tokyo winter fritter. Lotus root, yurine lily bulb, fuki stems.
The regional split runs, as it does for udon broth and eel, roughly between Tokyo and Osaka. Edomae tempura is built on the bay fish above, fried in sesame oil to a deep gold, and eaten with a strong dipping sauce. Kansai tempura leans to vegetables, especially the Kyoto heirloom varieties, fried in a lighter oil to a paler colour, and eaten with salt. Neither is the original; both are old.
What happens before the oil: preparation and the schools
Most of the skill in tempura is invisible to the customer, because it happens to the ingredient before it is battered. Some of it is universal; some of it is where schools differ.
The prawn. A kuruma ebi is not just shelled. The tip of the tail is snipped and the water inside squeezed out with the back of a knife — because that water turns to steam in the oil and bursts the tail, spitting hot oil at the cook. Then the underside is scored at intervals and the prawn is pressed straight, breaking the muscle so that it does not curl into a ball as it cooks. A straight prawn is not an aesthetic preference; it is a sign that someone did the work. The vein is removed with a skewer. Some chefs leave the tail shell on and score it into a fan; some remove it.
The kisu. Butterflied from the back, spine lifted out in one piece. The spine is then fried separately as a crisp — hone-senbei, “bone cracker” — which is why a good counter serves you two things from one fish.
The hamo. Pike conger has hundreds of fine bones that cannot be removed. Kansai solved this with honekiri: the fish is scored with a heavy knife at intervals of about a millimetre, cutting through the bones but not the skin, so that a three-centimetre length carries something like two dozen cuts. When it hits the oil the flesh blooms outward between the cuts. It is the most demanding routine piece of knife work in Japanese kitchens, and it is the reason hamo tempura exists in Kyoto and not in Tokyo.
The vegetables. Aubergine is scored into a fan so it cooks through and the batter grips. Shiitake gets a cross cut in the cap. Lotus root goes into vinegared water so it does not discolour. Shiso leaf is battered on one side only — the underside — so the green shows through. Sweet potato is cut thick and then, at the most famous counter in Ginza, treated almost as a roast (below).
The batter. This is the clearest line between schools. The Edo tradition uses egg; a Kansai or “white” style may use only water; there are counters that use yolk only, historically called kinpura (gold tempura) for its colour, and a few that use white only, ginpura. Some chefs sift the flour and chill it. Some add a little sake. The constant, whatever the school, is that the batter is made in small batches, stirred barely, and used within minutes, because the enemy is gluten and gluten develops with time and agitation.
The oil is the other school marker. Tokyo counters have historically used sesame oil, or a blend with sesame, which darkens the batter and adds a toasted aroma; Fumio Kondo of Tempura Kondo uses untoasted and toasted sesame in a three-to-one blend. Kansai favours lighter oils — cottonseed, corn, rice bran — for a pale result. Several modern counters change oil partway through the meal, moving from a lighter oil for vegetables to a sesame-heavy one for fish.
What frying is actually doing
“Deep-frying” describes the equipment, not the cooking. What happens to a piece of kisu in 180-degree oil is a sequence, and the tempura chef Tetsuya Saotome of Mikawa Zezankyo — the person most often called the god of tempura in Japan — describes it as steaming and roasting at the same time.
The batter hits the oil and its surface water flashes to steam. That steam pushes outward, which is why tempura does not soak up oil the way people assume: while water is leaving, oil cannot easily enter. Inside the shell the batter has just formed, the ingredient is not in contact with oil at all. It is in a small chamber of its own moisture, cooking at or below the boiling point of water. That is the steaming. Meanwhile the outside of the batter, once its water has gone, climbs toward the oil temperature and browns. That is the roasting. The whole craft consists in stopping the process at the point where the outside has roasted and the inside has only just steamed.
This is why tempura batter is engineered to be thin and structureless. A thick, bready coating holds steam in and turns the inside soggy; a thin, lumpy one lets the steam escape as fast as it forms and stays crisp. It is also why a great prawn is translucent at the centre: the chef stopped at the steaming stage. And it is why the thing arrives on a folded sheet of paper and must be eaten within about a minute — the steam that made it crisp is still coming out, and once it stops, it condenses.
Kondo pushes the same physics the other way. His sweet potato is cut seven centimetres thick and fried for about thirty minutes in oil that is kept low, then wrapped in paper and left for ten. He calls tempura “residual-heat cooking”: the oil is not cooking the centre of the potato; the potato’s own retained heat is, after it has left the pan. A thirty-minute tempura and a sixty-second tempura are the same technique at two ends of a dial.
Temperature and seconds
A tempura counter has no thermometer in view and no timer. The chef is reading three things.
The oil, by the batter. A drop of batter into the pan tells the temperature. If it sinks to the bottom and rises slowly, the oil is around 160. If it sinks halfway and comes back, around 170. If it barely dips before floating and dancing, 180 or above. Chefs do this constantly, almost unconsciously, between pieces.
The bands. Leaf vegetables and anything delicate — shiso, sansai, myoga — go in at the low end, 150 to 160, where they will not scorch before they crisp. Root vegetables and aubergine at 160 to 170, long enough to cook through. Seafood at 170 to 185, hot and short, so the outside sets before the inside overcooks. Kakiage, the fritters, in between, and turned once.
The sound. A piece that has just gone in makes a high, violent hiss — water leaving at speed. As the water goes, the pitch drops and the bubbles slow. The moment the sound goes quiet and the bubbles become large and lazy is the moment the piece is done; some chefs say they cook by ear more than by eye. When you watch a counter, listen.
Then the seconds. A prawn: under a minute at most counters, and famously far less at some, where the centre is left just short of raw. A kisu: about a minute. An anago: two to three. Shirako: a minute, gently. Oysters: ninety seconds, until the sound changes. Kondo’s sweet potato: thirty minutes. None of these are rules; they are what happens when you stop at the point the physics above describes, for that ingredient, at that size, in that oil.
Two things the customer controls. A counter fries one piece at a time and places it on your paper the moment it is done, because adding several pieces at once drops the oil temperature and the timing collapses. So the pace of the meal is the chef’s, and the correct response is to eat each piece as it arrives. And the paper is not a napkin: it absorbs oil from the underside so the batter does not go soft from below. Leave the piece on it, not on the plate beside it.
What you put on it, and what each one is for
There are two systems and they are not interchangeable.
Tentsuyu — the dipping sauce — is dashi, mirin and soy in roughly a four-to-one-to-one ratio, served warm. Grated daikon is stirred in, and often grated ginger. The daikon is the functional part: it cools the piece slightly, cuts richness, and by tradition helps digest the oil. The sauce suits strong, oily pieces — anago, kakiage, the deep-gold Edo style fried in sesame — because it can stand up to them. Its cost is that it softens the batter on contact, so the dip is a touch, not a soak. The Tokyo school leans on tentsuyu; it evolved alongside sesame oil and needed the strength.
Salt keeps the batter crisp and lets a delicate ingredient taste of itself, which is why the Kansai school and most modern counters serve it first. A good counter offers several: plain sea salt, moshio (salt made with seaweed, faintly savoury), matcha salt whose bitterness cuts oil, sansho pepper salt for anything rich, yuzu salt, ume salt. The rule of thumb is that the more delicate the piece, the plainer the salt: sansai with plain salt, prawn with a little matcha, anago with sansho.
Citrus — a wedge of sudachi or kabosu, or lemon — does the same job as daikon by a different route: acid against fat. Squeeze it over the piece, not into the salt.
The don sauce is its own thing. When tempura goes over rice as tendon, the sauce is soy, mirin and sugar reduced to a glaze, and the pieces are dipped in it whole. It is sweeter and thicker than tentsuyu and it is meant to soak in; the softening that is a fault at the counter is the point in the bowl.
If the chef puts salt beside a piece, or has already brushed it, use that and nothing else. The seasoning is the instruction.
Where tempura is going
For most of the twentieth century tempura was a settled form: a counter, a chef, the bay fish, the sesame oil, tentsuyu. Since roughly the 1990s a handful of people have taken it apart, and the changes have mostly stuck.
Vegetables became the point. Kondo opened his Ginza counter in 1991 and made the case that a vegetable could be the main event of a tempura course rather than the filler between fish. The thirty-minute sweet potato and the thread-cut carrot kakiage are his; so, in a real sense, is the modern assumption that a great tempura counter will serve you as many vegetables as fish, chosen by the week.
The physics got explained. Saotome’s framing of tempura as simultaneous steaming and roasting turned a craft learned by imitation into one that could be taught by principle. Younger chefs now talk about tempura in terms of moisture, thermal mass and residual heat, and cook accordingly — prawns pulled earlier, thick pieces rested longer.
The oil changed. Untoasted sesame oil, rice bran oil and blends have loosened the sesame-or-nothing rule of Tokyo. Several counters now run two or three oils in a meal.
The batter opened up. Sparkling water, ice in the bowl, flour blends with rice flour or potato starch, and — increasingly — fully gluten-free batters using rice flour alone, which for tempura is not a compromise at all, since the whole point was always to have as little gluten as possible.
The counter got cheaper, and got a bar. Standing tempura counters and lunch-set specialists have made counter-style tempura, fried one piece at a time, available at a fraction of the price of the Ginza rooms. Tempura with wine, tempura with a sake list, tempura as the second course of a kaiseki meal — the form has become portable in a way sushi did a generation earlier.
And it left. Tempura is now a technique used in kitchens that are not Japanese — the tempura-battered ingredient inside a Peruvian Nikkei dish, the tempura element on a tasting menu in London — and the word has become a generic term abroad for anything fried in a light batter. Some of that is unrecognisable. Some of it, like the best Nikkei cooking, is a genuine extension. The interesting question for the next decade is whether the Japanese counter absorbs any of it back.
What has not changed is the paper, the single piece, the sixty seconds, and the instruction to eat it now.
Back to the start: where tempura came from →
Related: why Japanese fish can be eaten raw — ikejime and the cold chain →
Related: matcha salt and the savoury side of matcha →