Rarely Ordered | Adventurous dining made safe!

Okra Tempura

The first of our series of Rare Recipes!

I always love it when a certain way of preparing makes me love an ingredient I would usually hate. Okra is something that dissuades a lot of people – me included. But having this dish prepared at home by my beloved mother, successfully made me LOVE okra for the very first time. It is one of the simplest and most straightforward ways of preparing it too – making vegetable tempura out of it. Due to the oil, the sticky taste of okra is minimized and due to the deep fried golden batter, it is actually crispy. With the sauce, it has an oriental but Filipinized taste.

Ingredients:

Okra (any number of pieces, sliced as shown below)
Tempura Flour
Tempura Sauce: A chicken stock cube, 1 piece grated radish, 2 teaspoons soy sauce, ¼ cup 7-Up or Sprite boiled for about three minutes in 1 and ½ cup water.

Preparation:

1.Follow directions in the tempura flour box. Typically however, it is simply mixing it with cold water and leaving the mixture lumpy.
2.Heat the deep fryer to 170 C (340 F).
3.Dip the pieces of sliced okra in the batter and deep fry until golden. Typically, this should only take a minute or two.
4.Pat dry the pieces and / or serve them on paper towels on a plate.
5.Best eaten straight off the fryer with steaming-hot rice and the sauce prescribed above.

Tips:

Do not slice the okra too thick – or they might lose their potential crispiness. A fairly large okra piece should do about 3-4 pieces. The okra piece shown in the picture is medium-sized. Oh and by the way, the two ends shown are to be thrown away. (for obsessive-compulsive people out there)

The Japanese name for vegetable tempura is Shojin-age – and is done with a wide variety of vegetables. We all know some of these vegetables – kangkong, zucchini and eggplant are all common. It takes a the Rarely Ordered spirit to experiment with other veggies – so go ahead use the steps above with a different vegetable!

Deep frying isn’t really unhealthy – it is in the kind of oil used and the technique of cooking it that makes deep frying retain a lot of the unhealthy trans-fats. Ideally, use new canola or soybean oil and quickly remove the pieces after they have become golden brown. The moisture in the food used usually repels the oil – unless it is overcooked. Besides, overcooked veggies taste horrible! Thus, if you prepared a good tasting batch, be rest assured its a healthy batch too.

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