Nika's Culinaria - Eat With Your Eyes

(Tempura Bacon, its whats for breakfast, lunch, or supper)

I adore tempura as a nice break from sushi when I go out to the woefully few Japanese restaurants here in the rural boonies of Massachusetts. I have not really tried to make it at home because 1) when I am grocery shopping at enormo-food-hell supermarket they just do not have tempura batter that calls my name and 2) I usually decide against making oil-laden foods.

But sometimes, especially when you have a new deep fryer that is so easy it could walk your dog and paint your nails for you, you get a wild hair to fry SOMETHING up.

I know, its not well what happened, but it did.

The third element that enabled me to do this deed was that I found some tempura batter mix at my favorite Japanese grocery store in Worcester. Now the game was on.

I have been harboring a secret desire to make tempura bacon and hot dogs so I finally did. You can see those images at the top and bottom of this post.

Let me assure you that if you do this right the bacon comes out quite edible and delicious in a seriously gluttonous way. The hot dog needs to be eaten as soon as it cools because it can get dried out. I am not a huge dog fan so maybe I am just picky about my dog-texture.

Be sure to use cold tempura batter. You see Iron Chef Morimoto putting icy water in his mix. I ran out of ice so I used reallly cold water, mixed it all up and then held it in the freezer for a bit to really cool off. The other thing I did was to dip the bacon (and later hot dogs and onions) in the wet tempura mix and then in panko bread crumbs and THEN carefully put it into the deep fryer basket (when it was in the oil so the bacon and dogs just float on the surface and dont stick to the basket).

There is really not much more to add to this. I am part scots so MAYBE thats my excuse? I am also part many other things so its possible that I am just wrong. Just pass me the napkins.


(Tempura hot dogs, yeah thats what I said)