(mellow piano music)
- So now, so what are we making now?
- So we're making,
I wanna show you why I deep fry in a wok.
And I thought we would make my mom's Japanese croquettes.
- Oh. - Yeah.
So croquettes, you know, they're clearly European.
They came to Japan through Portuguese
- Some horrible (expletive) where some-
- They came to Japan.
Portuguese missionaries brought them to Japan.
- Oh, nevermind, some nice (expletive).
(laughter)
I just assumed it was murder and whatever.
Anyway.
- But my mom always made croquettes.
She made hers with ground beef, always potato,
which is the sort of the traditional choice
and then whatever sort of frozen
and leftover vegetable she had.
So it was usually like some amount
of frozen spinach, carrots, onions.
This is a great way to sort of use up
any kind of leftover vegetables you have.
So whatever you want to throw in here,
you can use it and you bread it and fry it
and it comes out delicious.
- It is your mom's recipe, its very, very special.
Is this in the book?
- It is in the book.
- It's in the book, folks.
Go out and get the book.
Out now, The Wok: Recipes and Techniques, J Kenji Lopez Alt.
- In the deep frying chapter.
- The deep frying chapter, check it out.
It's a hot one.
(laughter)
(funky string bass music)
- We're gonna start.
This is a two step, three step process actually.
We're gonna start by making the filling.
So my mom would always make this
with leftover mashed potatoes.
You can make it with potatoes
that you've just cooked for yourself.
We had Andrew cooking potatoes this morning.
So we have fresh cooked potatoes.
The other part is making the rest of the filling.
So I'm gonna start with some
oil, in this case, a little bit of chicken fat,
and this is a relatively relaxed process.
You don't need the super high temperatures
that you would do for a stir fry.
And about eight ounces of ground beef.
In this case, it doesn't matter what the beef is.
You could use ground turkey, you could use ground chicken
you could use lean, fatty,
it doesn't really matter that much.
It's a really, really easy and forgiving process.
All right, so my meat is cooked.
I'm just gonna add now
carrots, garlic and onions,
little salt.
We're just gonna cook this
until the onions and carrots are kind of softened.
All right, so there's our meat mixture.
Pretty much done.
We got a couple pounds of russet potatoes.
So these are boiled and sort of spread out
in order to dry a little bit
cause you don't want them too wet.
We're gonna add some butter in there.
Salt.
Okay. And now this is the part where
I already stray from the recipe
that I have right in front of me,
cuz in the recipe I tell you to mash the potatoes,
then add the the meat mixture.
But honestly it doesn't matter.
(Laughter)
So, but what you're looking for basically
is a relatively chunky, but you know,
smooth enough that it holds together.
The trick that my mom taught me,
you know if you're trying to make a ball of this mixture
which is what we're gonna do,
and it seems to keep falling apart,
instant mashed potato flakes.
That's what she does.
She sprinkles 'em in there and kind of folds 'em together
until it comes together.
And you add just as much as you need,
but these are folding together nicely.
That's what you're looking for.
Okay. Actually, I'm gonna taste a little bit, make sure
Yeah. Seasoned well.
Okay. So we're gonna form a real typical
breading station here.
So I got flour in one plate there.
I get some eggs here
and I've got Panko style breadcrumbs over there.
All right.
So you're looking to beat your eggs
until basically they are smooth like this.
You don't want big lumps.
You want them to run off in smooth strands.
All right.
So we're gonna make these croquettes now.
So I'm taking like a sort of,
I mean you of course make 'em whatever size you want.
And when I make these with my daughter
we like to make a huge mix of sizes
because she thinks they're more fun to eat that way.
And I agree with her actually.
So this is the normal size that my mom would make.
So kind of hand sized in there.
We can do a tiny one just for my daughter.
- [Andrew] Aww.
- So I'm gonna start with that,
just enough to fit in my tray here.
Give 'em a good coat, both sides, just standard breading.
So flour, eggs, breadcrumbs, and the flour sort of is
like your primer that helps your egg coating stick.
And what I like to do is I pick it up.
I give it a little toss like this,
that way all the excess flour comes off
and then into the egg.
And then I'm gonna use my other hand
to get the egg coating on there.
And so you always use one wet hand and one dry hand,
that way you don't end up sort of breading your fingers.
All right.
So what I'm doing is when I get the egged croquette in here,
I put it in a place where there's a lot of breadcrumbs
and I take some breadcrumbs and I sprinkle them on top,
you know, with my dry use hand.
Okay? And then I can kind of pick it up, roll it around
and make sure that I'm getting a nice coating
and that way this hand doesn't get any wet egg on it
and you get a nice even coating.
Again, you kind toss it to get rid of the excess.
And that's that.
So there's a couple reasons
why I prefer deep frying in a wok.
One of them, the main one is the shape.
So you have these nice flared sides.
And so you're gonna see when I put food in here,
it makes it really easy to kind of
get under the food and scoop around it like that.
Whereas with a tall sided Dutch oven or something,
you get in here and then you kind of have to pry underneath
to move things around.
So the shape makes it really easy to handle food.
That shape also allows for more evaporation.
So your things are gonna fry faster with less oil.
And finally, as your food goes in there
and starts to splatter,
with a wide flared wok like this oil splatters
and it kind of gets caught on the side
and flows back down for the most part.
You know, you are gonna get a little bit of splatter
but with a straight sided skillet,
most of the splatter that goes up,
ends up going over the edge
and gets down into your countertop.
So it saves you some cleaning, it's safer,
it's easier to handle things and you can use less oil.
So that's why I think the wok is the best tool
for deep frying.
All right, so when you're gonna deep fry foods
there's a couple ways you can do it.
If you're really scared of the oil,
you can of course take your spider,
put your food in it like that.
And then very gently lower it down.
That way your hand doesn't have to get anywhere near.
I typically just use my hand
cuz I like to work with my hands.
So the trick with deep frying,
if you're afraid of the oil,
so the oil will sense it.
So you you don't wanna be standing back here
dropping things.
You wanna basically get your fingers
as close as you can to the surface without touching
and you can just sort of lower it in and then,
you always wanna drop it away from you
instead of towards you so that the oil splashes backwards
and not into you.
- May I try one?
- Made that mistakes many times
Yeah, yeah. Go for it. Go for it.
- I'm also scared of oil.
I think it's a natural human fear.
So just down as close as I can and just kind of-bloop
- Yep.
- And if you were really afraid of oil
I got a really great tip for this,
- Okay. - Go to a restaurant.
- All right.
So I've got all my croquettes in there and now,
so this is the part where a wok, you know, is really nice.
You got all the space to work so it's very simple
and it lets you keep your food moving.
Keeping your food moving is a really important process
when you're frying because what you're doing is
you're creating convection.
And so you're constantly exposing the fried food
to fresh hot oil.
If you let it just sit there
it cooks at one temperature, it cooks at one rate.
But if you keep it moving around
it actually cooks a little faster and it browns more evenly.
All right.
So this kind of golden color is what we're going for here.
All right.
And so these are out, you can do the next batch
immediately after you don't really have to wait for this.
And then, you know, my old chef, Ken Oringer,
always used to tell us that
he doesn't care if you're frying dog shit,
you want to season it right when it comes outta the fryer
so that the salt sticks.
And even if it's properly seasoned on the inside
you want that like that crusty salty bite on the exterior.
So these are the croquettes.
So we would have these generally with like a side of rice
and furikake, and usually some
steamed asparagus or broccoli with QP Mayo,
and then the sauce for them.
I always use okonomiyaki sauce sauce or tonkatsu sauce.
So this one actually literally came
from my mom's pantry this morning.
I told her I was coming here
and I asked her if she had any bull dog sauce,
and that's it.
- So many of these are such simple things, but so beautiful.
- Yeah. I mean, this is Japanese home cooking.
Real.
Cheers. - Cheers, ting.
(croquettes crunching)
Hot. (laughter)
The tonkatsu sauce is really what makes it
cuz it's like so rich and so like starchy
and then it's got this nice bright sauce cutting it.
- Mm hmm.
If you don't have tonkatsu, you can do
like two to one ketchup up to Worcestershire sauce
with a little bit of soy sauce in there,
and you'll get a pretty close approximation to that.
Okay. So we are now gonna make some tempura.
It's very simple.
It's a Japanese style of deep frying.
It originally comes from the Portuguese
and the word in fact is a lone word from Portuguese
but it's a Japanese style of deep frying.
The batter I'm using here is,
this is all purpose flour and corn starch,
that's equal parts, two cups each
and then a tablespoon of baking powder.
Little pinch a salt.
And then we're just gonna mix this up.
- What's the ideal size for tempura sweet potato?
- Oh, just like,
like quarter inch slices.
(Sweet potato bangs around)
- Okay.
- Okay. So this, we can now store.
I'm gonna take out exactly what I need for this recipe
which is gonna be an eyeballed amount.
But I'll start with about,
say about a cup and a half of the mixture.
And now we're gonna make our sauce.
So I'm gonna make a really classic soy-dashi dipping sauce
but I'm gonna make it the way my mom made
which was using hondashi, which is like granulated.
So dashi is a fish stock made out of smoked bonito
and seaweed.
My mom always just used the granulated stuff.
In fact, this came out of her pantry this morning again.
I got about a half cup of water here.
I'm gonna add teaspoon or so.
So this is dashi now, which is just instant dashi.
You can use of course, fresh dashi
if you want to be fancy with it.
The recipe that I use,
I eyeball it, but I go about 85% dashi, about 10% mirin,
which is a sweet rice wine.
And then about 5% shoyu .
And you want it to have a sort of mild, sweet,
salty and savory balance.
That taste good to me.
Now the real key with tempura is that you don't want
to over mix the batter.
So this is a flour based batter and flour,
if you've ever made bread dough,
flour develops what's called gluten,
which is the sort of sticky network
of interconnected proteins that give bread its structure.
And the more you knead it and the more you work it
the more that structure sets up.
So with tempura, the goal is to keep it super, super light
almost like a cloud.
So you don't want any sort of gluten production at all.
A couple tricks to minimizing that.
One of them is that I use a combination
of water and vodka in here.
So vodka will moisten it
but it won't form gluten cuz gluten doesn't form in alcohol.
So you'll minimize the amount of gluten you're forming
by using vodka.
So I'm gonna do some vodka
and then I'm gonna do some
cold soda water.
Cold again is important because gluten forms better
at higher temperatures.
But what we're really trying to get the right texture
while minimizing the amount of mixing we're doing.
Bumps are okay.
You don't want a smooth batter at the end.
And by the way, using soda water like that also adds
these sort of bubbles to it that aerate it
and keep the batter puffy as it cooks.
This is the texture we're looking for.
So kind of thick lumpy paint.
So you can do tempura with a variety
of vegetables of course,
or seafood is really nice with tempura.
You just want it to be cut into a sort of uniform thickness.
So I go for about a quarter of an inch for most vegetables.
That's about the right thickness
so that they'll finish cooking through and tenderize
by the time the crust is crispy.
So you go in, you're gonna have one sort of dirty hand
with tempura and you wanna give it a nice coating like that.
But again, don't over mix it.
You really wanna be very gentle with it.
So nice thin coating like this
and then right down into the oil.
You should see it immediately start sort of
start puffing and sputtering.
And that's a sign that your oil's at the right temperature.
I'm doing sweet potato here, which is one of my favorites.
So when you're done, you can also, if you want
you can dip your fingers in the here,
like this in the batter
and just give yourself some extra crunchies
and kind of go over the vegetables so that you create
these kind of puffy bits that stick out.
And of course you have all those extra crunchy
bits that you can save and add to salads,
or put on top of your soup or whatever you want.
The trick here again is
you want to try and keep things moving as much as possible.
So be a little bit gentle with it at first
but you do want to kind of constantly have oil flowing
over the top of the ingredients
so that you're really encouraging evaporation
and you're encouraging rapid crisping
and you're encouraging the air bubbles inside
to expand and puff out.
And that's what's gonna give you the really light,
nice light, ideal tempura.
All right.
So here's what we're looking with tempura.
We want crispy.
Yep. We're there,
but we don't want much color.
So tempura like is sort of prized for its light flavor
cuz you really want the flavor of the vegetables
to come out.
So the coating itself is mainly about adding texture
and to let the vegetables really shine.
So no dark color, nice and blonde like that.
Straight into the we used to call it at the restaurant,
we used to call these diaper pans, diaper bowls.
- [Andrew] All right.
So tempura sweet potato.
- Yeah. tempura sweet potato.
You know the key steps make the batter fresh
right before you fry it.
You know, at the restaurants I've worked at
there was a rule that the batter couldn't be more
than 10 minutes old.
So if a new order came in
and it had been 10 minutes since the last one,
you make it fresh.
Because otherwise what happens is
you develop too much gluten and becomes tough
instead of staying light and crisp.
Oil control, temperature management, again
and then to keep it moving while it's in there.
- This is really delicious, very simple thing.
All these very simple illustrations
of seemingly complex concepts that get super easy
the more and more you try them.
Folks, ehh ahh
(laughter)
(unintelligible) Lopez all, the cookbook's out now.
Folks, the J Kenji Lopez- Alt has a new cookbook out now.
It is called The Wok: Recipes and Techniques.
It is the spiritual sequel to his smash hit, all timer,
The Food Lab, which came out several years ago
and has since been awarded James Beard awards
and all different kinds of
this is the best cookbook ever written awards.
And this one's next, its in stores now.
Thanks so much for coming.
- Thank you for having me.
- Was delicious.
See you next time. - It was good to see you.
Yeah.