The miracle of tempura?
It makes vegetables so tasty that you sometimes get a seasoned bacontarian to eat broccoli.
My friend Nathan, a passionate fan of Japanese cuisine, recently taught me a simple tempura recipe, as well as a truly repulsive mock ponzu sauce. We battered and deep fried sweet potatoes, carrots, onion, red and green pepper, brocoli and shrimp and ate them standing in front of the stove so nothing got cold.
It was delicious. But there was something missing.
Bacon.
If tempura could make me crave sweet potatoes, just think what it could do for that most blessed of foods.
With friends coming to celebrate Sukkot with us, I decided the perfect snack for our decidedly unorthodox household was tempura bacon. Our local butcher cut a pound of bacon very thick, and I fried it up, leaving it significantly limper than I’d usually serve it.
I whipped up Nate’s tempura batter – half a cup of warm water, a beaten egg, a big pinch of salt, sufficient flour to make a thin, lumpy batter, about 3/4 cup – and cut the bacon into bite-sized chunks. And I cut a couple of onions into chunks as well figuring that I’d want to accomodate the vegetarians as well.
This turned out to be a critical factor in the recipe’s success. My friend Seth Brown, master of all fried foodstuffs, showed up to help me batter and fry the bacon. (Seth is notorious in our circle of friends for having such a frying-centric approach to cooking that, in college, he briefly suffered from scurvy before friends diagnosed his bleeding gums and prescibed lime juice.)
We quickly discovered that tempura bacon, while crunchy and smoky, suffered from a surplus of batter. The payload needed more mass to properly balance the batter. Seth’s solution – pair a bite of bacon with a slice of onion.
The resulting tempura bites have an elegant balance of softness and crunch, and a pleasant melding of the onion’s sweetness with the bacon and batter’s salt.
We served them in the sukkah with a soy/garlic/red pepper dipping sauce.
Mmm. Sacri-delicious.
Oh.. my… god…
You are absolutely my hero!
We tried to make Tempura Bacon once, but the alcohol prevented coming up with something coherent like you guys did (adding the onion). You can see a glimps of it at: http://deadspot.com/~orb/orb.wmv
Anyways, keep up the good work! Try some bacon desserts, like bacon ice cream, bacon cake, or maybe even a bacon smoothie!
Yes!!!! the one thing missing from almost everything is bacon.
STRONG.
yum!
Your lost sheep has been found — just this morning I was horrified to discover that I gave up REAL BACON a year ago for TURKEY BACON – yes, I know. Check out my blog to hear my horrifying tale. Thanks for being there
I wept, literally wept at the beauty of tempura bacon tempura. I have found my soul and it is deep fried pork.
There is a God, and He is a kind and loving God, beneficent, generous and merciful.
I’m really glad that someone else got scurvy in college. My roommate and I also got scurvy one summer from not eating fruits and vegetables. We were like heroes. Toothless, pathetic heroes.
Tempura bacon sounds amazing.
Man, the closest I could come to that is a bagel with bacon and chive cream cheese, and a sausage patty or two. Opa!
I made my famous bacon cake (Cake’n) for the guests at my wedding in October. Sweet and tender, studded with lovely bits of porky goodness. . .I even add some rendered bacon fat instead of crisco. I tried it once with a maple creamcheese frosting, but it was just not necessary. Why gild the lily?
Here in Texas we have chicken fried bacon, a less sissy, coated, twice-fried bacon. http://www.recipezaar.com/156010
When you say to pair the bacon with the onion, do you mean batter each piece separately, fry and eat together or do you mean somehow attaching them together, battering, then frying that way?
Thanks! This sounds AMAZING.