Have your tempura and eat it too! A Japanese Cooking Class at Palate Sensations
PUBLISHED August 6th, 2012 03:09 pm | UPDATED May 9th, 2018 03:13 am
It’s a bit of an understatement to say that Japanese cuisine holds a special place in the hearts (and bellies) of the people. I think I speak for the rest of the sushi-chomping, ramen-slurping horde when I say that eating Japanese food is something we do very well indeed. Making Japanese food though, isn’t something you get to do every day – so when I got the opportunity to take a Japanese cooking class at Palate Sensations, I jumped at the chance to learn how my beloved dishes come into being (and, of course, to eat them too!).
As it turns out, turning simple ingredients into a legit Japanese meal is a precise and delicate art. In other words, if not for the excellent instruction, we would have had many a disaster on our hands!
It takes a seasoned hand to make good Japanese food and our amazing teacher and chef Amelia Seto was just that. With years of experience making home-cooked meals for her Japanese family behind her, she managed to make the session both personal and professional at the same time. While it was disorienting at first to be in a professional kitchen – I admit I spent the first half an hour looking for utensils and bungling ingredients – eventually we all got into the swing of things. She started us off with dashi, the bonito-based stock at the heart of Japanese cuisine. First lesson – dashi more or less goes into all Japanese food.
We make the dashi (after a lot of measuring, pouring, stirring and timing!) and prepare it for the agedashi tofu we are to make next. Agedashi tofu is, in essence, deep-fried silken tofu, drenched in a dashi-based sauce. But unlike any old deep-fried tofu, the sauce transforms the batter into a distinct, sweet-sticky layer that clings to the beancurd like the thinnest of skins. We make the sauce, prepare the garnish and deep-fry the tofu in a batter of katakuriko – potato starch – and hel-lo beautiful!
No one else may admit to it, but we all ended up drinking the sauce from the bowls. It was that good!
Next, we made what must have been the smoothest (I may be a little biased here) most slurp-able chawanmushi I’ve ever had. I am convinced this is because Chef shared with us many tips and tricks which together, made all the difference.
Straining the egg and dashi mixture for the smoothest custard possible!
Without a doubt, the hardest dish to get right was the tempura, which we tackled next. First things first, we assemble the ingredients…
…and prepare them for their debut.
Deep-frying takes serious skill, the lack of which we made up for with Chef’s patience and experience. At the end of a long, harrowing 15 minutes in front of the deep-fryer – we all got a turn! – there was a crash course on the ‘Principles of Contemporary Tempura Arrangement’.
Needless to say, the tempura was glorious. Not quite as crispy as I would like, but I think the fact that I had lovingly nurtured these nuggets of golden, deep-fried heaven from beginning to end was the highlight of the experience. Nothing is quite as satisfying as eating your own food, I think, and finding it (unexpectedly) amazing!
Finally, we made a simple cha-soba to wash it all down. Full as we already were, we managed to surprise ourselves by eating quite a lot of the soba because it was – as we had come to expect – excellent.
I really enjoyed the fact that the cooking class was completely hands-on – Chef was around to instruct and advise, but she was happy to leave us to the actual cooking. If you’re a bit of a kitchen whizz, a Japanese food aficionado or even just someone with a tempura craving and a weekend afternoon to spare, this is somewhere you should definitely check out! One-time classes start from $120 (and include a whole variety of cuisine options other than Japanese, including cake decorating and pastry) – so get cooking!
Written by Scramble
Class sponsored by Palate Sensations
