$311 vs $17 Tempura: Pro Chef & Home Cook Swap Ingredients

So I'm getting this open here.

Oh my God.

We have a fish in here. [chuckles]

The animal kingdom is no joke, guys.

[sinister music]

My name is Taka, I'm a professional chef,

and these are my $311 tempura ingredients.

[sinister music]

I'm Gabi, I'm a home cook,

and these are my $17 tempura ingredients.

[sinister music]

No. [chuckles]

Not my eel. [chuckles]

[bottles clinking]

I believe in you.

Okay, I can work with this.

Ooh.

Oh my God!

What?

[sinister music]

So the tempura I was gonna make

was going to be very special.

I did have live scallops to shuck, stuffed with uni,

and topped with caviar.

And these are scallops, for sure.

I see all their little eyeballs staring at me right now.

[Gabi giggles]

[Taka] I had a whole anago

or saltwater eel that I was going to filet.

How do you tempura an eel?

And some Japanese sweet potatoes.

All lightly-fried in a homemade tempura batter.

And it was gonna be served with sansho,

which is a Szechuan peppercorn salt,

and a tentsuyu dipping sauce

made with kombu and katsuobushi bonito flakes,

and with grated daikon and ginger.

It was gonna be fantastic and you took it away from me.

This is gonna be a really legit challenge.

With Gabi's recipe,

I have ingredients that you might find in your pantry

or in your local grocery.

These might seem like simple ingredients,

but with a little bit of technique,

we can really elevate this.

If I had to guess, all these ingredients cost $17.

[cash register dings]

Yeah? [laughs]

You guys see that? Professional.

Ooh, if I had to guess, $236.

[cash register dings] [Gabi gasps]

Wow.

Oh, lot of pressure.

I have Chef Taka's recipe book here

and this is what I'm gonna be making today.

Scallop uni with caviar.

Sansho salt eel.

This is a really new experience for me.

I mean I've worked with seafood before,

but I've never worked with eel.

It'll be interesting to see how you would de-bone something

that is like a snakey kinda bone. [chuckles]

I have my work cut out for me,

but I'm up for it. Let's do it.

Gabi, I know that you're an experienced home cook,

but you're gonna be working with a live fresh scallop.

I swear, I feel like I saw one move.

Personally, I love scallops.

I love the sweetness,

especially combined with the brininess of sea urchin.

I think it's a great combination.

My favorite tool actually to shuck scallops

is to use a butter knife,

releasing the main flesh from the shell.

It just feels like science class.

It's kinda fun.

[Taka] Then we're gonna use our hands

to release all the skirt around the main meat.

[Taka] And, voila You can go ahead

and rinse the scallops under a cold water.

All right, my scallops are shucked.

So what I'm gonna do is make one cohesive dish.

My tempura was going to be a basic battered shrimp

with veggies and soy fish sauce.

I'm gonna do something a little bit different.

The dish I'm gonna make is a shrimp and eggplant hasami-age.

The hasami portion means to sandwich something together

and age means to fry.

So what we're essentially gonna be doing here

is turning the eggplant into buns,

and the shrimp into the patty,

and making a giant eggplant and shrimp hasami-age tempura.

All I'm doing here is scoring it,

not cutting all the way through to the bottom.

Scoring it and salting it

before allowing the moisture to come out

is really gonna help to maintain crispiness after frying.

My scallops are shucked and now I'm gonna season 'em.

Next up, I got to butterfly my scallops

and add in a little piece of uni.

I'm very excited about this.

I believe uni is a part of a sea urchin.

Uni is the gonads of the sea urchin

Great.

It might sound a little strange,

but they're fantastic and it's a very luxury item.

Okay, so first thing I'm going to do

is butterfly my seasoned scallops.

When we say butterfly,

what we're trying to achieve here

is to cut the scallop in half,

but not cut it all the way through.

And now I'm just gonna go in

and get a piece of uni and we'll put it in.

Whoa.

Okay, and so now I'm just going to add

a little bit more seasoning.

So my scallop uni is all prepped and ready to go.

What I'm gonna be doing next

is making the patty for our hasami-age.

First up, I'm gonna do right now is to cut the white onion

that will be incorporated into our patty.

I have an eel.

Is it a specific kind of eel?

I sent Gabi some anago, which is ocean eel.

Beautiful, white flesh meat,

and when tempura becomes very soft and flaky.

So, Gabi, just a heads up,

fileting eel is not an easy task

for even professional chefs, so be patient.

Our goal here is to make sure

that we remove as much meat from the bones as possible,

and keep the fish whole and intact.

The technique that we use here is very awkward and different

from fileting other types of fish.

So, my Thor mallet and I have my spike.

We will be sticking a spike through the anago

into the cutting board.

[Gabi exhaling deeply]

This is new.

This is gonna be different.

All right. [metals clinking]

[Gabi chuckles]

Having a moment.

This is for the purposes of education.

So, here we go.

The next step, we're gonna take this unagi spike

and we're actually gonna pierce it through the eyes

and we're gonna forcefully put it

into the corner of your cutting board.

Eyeballs are are weird to me,

so, Chef Taka, this one's for you.

[Taka] There's actually a cut behind the back of the head

where you can stick the tip of your knife in

and start to filet.

And, so you can see in the stomach cavity,

it has the liver and the guts.

You can just kinda tear it out.

Okay, so now I've cleaned out the internal organs.

My focus is going to be on getting out the spine,

but it doesn't feel like it has any of the small bones

that a fish typically does.

Trim this part off.

I'm gonna trim off the tail,

and my eel is fileted.

Congratulations, you've fileted your first eel.

This, in order to absorb the salt and the seasoning,

has to rest for an hour.

Next up here is to now prep the shrimp.

For this recipe, specifically,

I'm gonna chop it as fine as I can

to get a real nice smooth paste.

So you can see how they're starting

to kinda stick to each other,

and this is what we're really looking for.

Now that we have all the shrimp chopped up,

I'm gonna start making the patty.

First, I'm gonna incorporate the white onions

that we chopped earlier,

and then I'm just gonna season this

with a little bit of fish sauce and soy sauce.

Just for this portion,

we're just gonna add just a tiny amount of flour.

And all the ingredients are binding together,

and so, it looks pretty good to me.

So Gabi gave me some beautiful carrots.

So what I'm gonna do here is,

it's actually a knife technique called katsuramuki.

This is where we take the knife

and we're gonna carve around any kinda cylindrical object.

So I'm just gonna turn this into juliennes.

And then from there, I'm gonna turn these

into small little cubes.

So now that we have all these cubes,

and we're gonna go ahead and mix this into the shrimp patty.

Mix this well.

Make the actual hasami-age.

And we're just gonna dust a very, very light layer

of flour here.

This is really gonna help make sure

that the patty stays connected to the eggplant bun.

We're gonna go ahead and fill our hasami-age

with the shrimp patty.

No waste, no waste.

And then we're gonna just make sure

that this is all kind of together and tight.

So now that the hasami-age is all prepped and ready,

we're just gonna set this aside until we're ready to fry.

So now I'm going to be making my sansho salt.

Equal parts salt and sansho.

[Taka] Sansho is a type of Szechuan peppercorn.

It has a very aromatic, citrusy smell to it,

but on the tongue it actually causes a numbing sensation

and peppery flavor.

Mm.

Sansho salt is done.

I guess this is going to be served alongside the eel.

Gabi has given me some of these

beautiful button mushrooms here.

What I'm gonna turn these into is actually a mushroom salt,

but it has a little bit extra depth

and a little bit more umami than your normal salt.

I'm just gonna go and just chop these down

as fast as I can essentially.

So turning on a little jet speed

to get through all these mushrooms.

[knife chopping]

And we're done.

And so now that we have all these sliced mushrooms,

we're gonna go ahead and mix this with kosher salt.

And, basically, the salt is gonna help

with the dehydration process.

We're just gonna go put this into a 200-degree oven,

until they're completely dry and crispy.

So the mushrooms are out of the oven,

and we're really looking for a nice, crispy,

kind of mushroom chip is what we're looking for.

I'm gonna go ahead and put this in my food processor,

and we're gonna go ahead and pulse this

until this gets all the way into a fine powder.

[processor whirring]

Yeah, just mushroom dust.

Smells great.

It actually has this like chocolate aroma.

Great, it looks like we got this mushroom

down into a fine powder.

So I'm gonna go ahead and put this into this bowl

and add salt to this to adjust the salinity.

After we fry our hasami-age,

we're gonna use this mushroom salt to season it

after it comes out from the fryer.

So I sent Gabi some Japanese sweet potato.

This one is called satsumaimo.

I'm just gonna go ahead and slice this into little rings.

Sweet potato is prepped nicely.

I'm just gonna salt it.

Everything is kinda gonna be as dry as possible.

This is gonna go into the fridge for 15 minutes.

We are one step closer to the perfect tempura.

So, with the remainder carrots,

I will be turning this into a shiozuke pickle.

Shiozuke really just translates to using salt to pickle.

So I'm gonna go first and take this carrot

and slice this very thinly,

and then I'm gonna put this into this mason jar.

Then I'm gonna take this lemon, remove the zest,

and turn that into very fine julienne.

Add that to the mason jar as well,

and then we're gonna go ahead and make our saltwater pickle.

And this is a little bit different

from maybe what you were thinking about a pickle.

There's no acid in this recipe.

This is really just water and salt.

And then once this water comes to a boil,

incorporate this into the carrots and the lemon zest,

and let that sit until it's cool.

Now I'm gonna start making my tentsuyu,

which is my dipping sauce.

What's really important to make a tentsuyu

is the starting with a great dashi.

Dashi is essentially the Japanese word for a stock

and the dashi is relatively simple.

It's gonna be water, the kombu,

and we're gonna really let that steep on a low heat.

So it's just coming to a simmer now.

So any second I'm gonna just turn it off,

and let it steep for an hour.

[Taka] And that's gonna really help

to draw out the flavor from the kombu.

So I have my kombu that's been steeping for an hour.

Now I'm going to bring it back up to a boil.

So now it's time to add in my bonito flakes.

It really doesn't take much time at all

to really draw out the flavor, about 30 seconds to a minute.

Then once that time is elapsed,

we can go ahead and strain all the ingredients,

and we'd be left with a beautiful katsuo dashi.

Now, I'm going to add in

about a cup of soy and a cup of mirin.

Mirin is the cooking wine.

I have my tentsuyu dipping sauce ready.

Gabi's not just making a tentsuyu,

[Gabi snickers]

but she'll also be adding grated ginger

and grated daikon radish to really heighten the sauce.

I specifically really love daikon.

I feel like it has that nice like spiciness to it.

Gabi's gonna be using an oroshigane.

This is actually the tool used

to grate radishes down into a smooth consistency.

Oroshigane.

Chef Taka can definitely help brush out

my pronunciation on that.

Oroshigane.

This is cool.

I've never used this.

So it's not like a grater where it falls out the other side.

It's just grating it in one place.

[Taka] We're gonna go ahead and place the grated radish

into a strainer.

Set this aside, so that excess water

will be removed from that radish.

Next up is my ginger.

[Taka] Ginger is there really

to help balance out the sweetness

that is inside the tentsuyu itself.

Okay, take two with the [mumbles].

Oroshigane.

And once she's finished grating the ginger,

we're gonna then put it on a cutting board and chop

to make sure that any of the ginger fibers

are all smoothed down as well.

And now I have my grated daikon

and I have my grated ginger for my tentsuyu.

Gabi gave me these eggs and she also gave me these onions,

and so I'm gonna be combining them together

to make a onion aioli.

I love the idea of aiolis with fried foods.

They work really well together.

I'm just gonna turn this on the high heat, get this to boil.

So it's been about 15 minutes or so.

You can see that the onions are nice and soft.

And from this next step here,

we're gonna strain all the liquid out.

And then from here, we're gonna puree this

into an onion puree.

There's no more large chunks of onion

and this is exactly what we're looking for.

Next step is we're actually gonna be making

the aioli itself.

And so essentially, this is a type of mayonnaise

is in aioli.

We're gonna break the egg yolk, incorporate the oil slowly.

The big thing that we're trying to avoid

is what we call separation or breaking of this aioli.

You can see it's setting up nicely

and that's what we want to look for, yeah?

And now that we have our aioli set here,

we're gonna use salt, a little bit of fish sauce,

we're gonna bring acid from the lemons,

and then we're gonna bring some sweetness in

from the onion puree.

And at the end, we're gonna add some lemon zest

to really heighten and brighten the aioli.

Last step for my tentsuyu is to combine everything.

So I have my dashi broth with mirin and soy.

[spoon clinking]

The daikons.

I'm gonna do a generous pinch of ginger.

Mm. I think Chef Taka's going to like it a lot.

Now it's time to focus on the batter.

From my understanding it's kind of like the,

the crux of tempura, right?

All the other ingredients can be fantastic,

but at the end if the batter is not right,

you do not have good tempura.

The difference from Chef Taka's recipe and mine

is that he's got the fancy bubbly water.

I did not have the fancy bubbly water.

And so essentially what I'm doing

is taking this regular water and turning in to soda water.

It's totally normal to use just regular water

for the tempura batter,

but having this carbonated water it goes extra step,

and ensuring that your tempura will come out crispy.

So tempura is all about reducing the gluten formation.

There's multiple ways in which we want to reduce the gluten.

One of the best ways is to make sure

that we're using a flour with low gluten to begin with.

I have a lot of challenges here

because I have all-purpose flour,

which is not a low gluten flour.

Other steps that we can take is carbonation of the water,

making sure the water is cold,

and adding other ingredients to the actual flour itself.

Introduction of egg is also another way

of reducing the amount of water

that's going into the the actual total batter.

Reducing gluten, but also increasing protein content,

which is gonna help maintain some of the crispiness.

Sparkling water and egg mixture ready.

And next step would be to add the flour to our bowl.

My pastry flour.

Lay this out.

This is when you know you're doing this for the chefs

when you bring out the food scale.

Chef Taka, did you use a food scale?

Eyeballing here.

You eyeballed it?

Wow. True pro.

Onto my potato starch, get this into here.

And I'm just gonna pour in the egg water

until it kind of reaches the right consistency.

And I think I'm gonna be looking

for a slightly looser batter than I normally would

because of all the kind of challenges that I have

with the ingredients that I'm carrying today.

I think I wanna keep it a little bit clumpy.

And you can still see

there's still lumps of flour in there.

And I think that we're pretty good here.

The tempura batter looks ready to me.

Before we batter everything, we gotta dredge it,

so I'm gonna go ahead and get dredging.

Going in with the pastry flour.

Making sure everything's really thoroughly covered.

I'm just gonna give everything a nice coating.

It's gonna help my batter stick.

All of my tempura ingredients are dredged

and they're ready for a batter.

All right, it's time to fry.

So this oil is a blend of sesame oil

and vegetable oil.

[Taka] I have a dutch oven here filled

with just regular vegetable oil.

And I'm gonna coat the entire thing in this flour

all the way around.

This is to remove the excess moisture.

This is really gonna help for the tempura batter

to adhere to the surface of it.

First step, I'm gonna take my sweet potato.

I'm gonna coat it in the batter,

[Taka] And gently and carefully,

gonna put it into the oil.

[oil sizzling]

And do that for all of them.

All right, so just a little salt.

I'm gonna try a fun technique just to try

and get it a little bit more crunchy, little crispy.

I'm gonna take some of my batter and throw it right on.

Crispy bits, adds more texture to the top surface.

It's gonna help to remain crispy,

even if that initial layer is not as crispy.

I'm expecting this to take about eight minutes or so.

And cook this for about three minutes.

[Taka] So I think that we're ready

to take this out of the oil.

[Gabi] And voila.

[Taka] And we're gonna season this with the mushroom salt

right when it gets out.

[Gabi] Little salt bae action.

Okay, so I'm just removing some of the bits

because I don't want any burnt crispies.

We're just gonna let this sit

until it's cool to the touch,

and then we'll be ready to plate.

And now the scallops.

Woo, dropped a little.

Wow.

They look great.

I can't believe they stayed together.

Done.

So I'm gonna go ahead and take this onto my cutting board,

and I'm gonna give this a cut in half

just to see where we're at.

And it's looking nice and cooked

all the way through the center.

Smells fantastic too.

I'm gonna do maybe like something that's a little bit

to the cascading effect.

So feeling good about that.

I'm gonna go ahead and cut these just down the middle.

I'm going to kind of, okay, that's looking good.

We'll start with that.

[Taka] Have this right here.

[Gabi] My beautiful eel, my sansho salt.

[Taka] I like to have my sauce right in front,

so I can get as much as possible here.

And I'm gonna put the pickles right in front

just to create a little bit of balance on the plate.

[Gabi] Go in with the caviar.

So Gabi's gonna be adding some beautiful osetra caviar.

Since we're not using any sauce

for this specific scallop dish,

it's a great addition to bring some more salinity

and flavor to the dish.

Going in with the crispies.

This is the shrimp and eggplant hasami-age,

onion aioli, carrot shiozuke.

I hope that Gabi likes it,

and I can't wait to see what she did

with the other ingredients.

And this is my take on Chef Taka's tempura.

Aye. [chuckles]

Wow. Love it.

Hi. Hi.

Nice to finally meet you Nice to meet you.

Oh my gosh, I feel like I've been with you all day.

I feel like I've been telling you

what to do all day long too.

[Gabi] Whoa. Whoa, no way.

No. Honestly, this is crazy.

I was like, I can't believe I'm making

like a uni scallop sandwich,

but you did that with the shrimp and the eggplant.

[Taka] Yeah. Turned the whole thing into a giant burger

[Gabi] what it looks like. Whoa.

This is really, wow.

This has a lot of finesse here.

I love the addition of the crunchies on the plate.

This plate looks far better than this plate.

I mean, when you're working with caviar,

it's like not that hard.

How do I approach this? I would approach this just

like you would do a sandwich. Sandwich.

So we're gonna take the piece.

We're gonna get a little dunk

[Gabi] Get a dip. into the sauce.

Cheers. Cheers.

Mm. Mm.

Oh my God. The shrimp burger is so good.

Right? It's nice and juicy.

It's got you to come up. Yeah. Truly shocked.

And the, oh my God, the aioli is so good.

I really wanna see what you think about my dish.

I'm so excited.

I'm so impressed.

The color is exactly the way it should be.

Not overly dark.

Just like even touching it to the touch,

it's got that nice crispness.

It's firm.

So I'm gonna go ahead and dive in

with these scallops and the uni.

All right. I'll start there with you.

Cheers. Cheers, cheers.

[Gabi] Okay.

That scallop is so fresh and so sweet.

This would go well with the sauce too.

So I'm actually gonna,

little saucy sauce too. A little dip?

Almost slipped it there.

Mm.

The sauce.

That really- I love the sauce.

I think that the katsuo, the smokiness from there,

that's one of the hardest things to get, right?

Mm.

I think one of the most impressive things

on the plate here is the anago.

This, this ocean eel.

You know, it's hard for anybody to do.

[Gabi] Woo. All right.

[Taka] You wanna sprinkle the sansho salt on.

I love that. I love elegance.

That's what I'm here for.

All right, cheers. Okay, cheers.

[Taka] Mm. Nice.

This is exactly how it should be.

You could sell this in a restaurant easily.

I applaud you, really. Thank you, chef.

Now I know how to do one eel, I'm ready.

Put me in, coach. [Chef Taka laughs]

I'm ready.