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I made kakiage. I’ve done it before, but it’s quite a lot of work, so usually we just have a (vegan) katsu with our Japanese curry. But carrots were on offer last week, so I got a huge batch. Some of it was used for the bolognese, some I steamed to go into the karreh itself, but still I had quite some left.

I julienned the carrots, cut two onions into pieces and added two packets of ham strips.

I think I added too much flour and maybe the water I used was not cold enough? It was ‘dough-y’.

I filled a pan with sunflower oil and when that was hot enough, I fried them up.

It was apparent that they were indeed, not crispy — and kakiage is supposed to be crispy, not bouncy like these are. At previous attempts, I did not have enough batter and the kakiage disintegrated — but now I had too much and I had stirred too much and the gluten got activated. So that’s something to keep in mind for next time!

But hey: deep fried dough with veggies and ham? You know it’s delicious.

I made a batch of 18. Two of those we ate fresh (couldn’t help ourselves!) but the rest we divided into two batches of 8 pieces each. One of those is now in the freezer. The other we ate today: we reheated/re-fried them in the airfryer, which worked well. They even crisped up a bit, but of course not enough to make it like a ‘real’ kakiage.

We had them with steamed Japanese-style shortgrain rice and a medium hot Japanese curry with onion, carrots and sweet potato.