For Restaurant Quality Tempura, Make Sure To Use The Right Frying Oil

A lot of fried foods can be easy to make in your kitchen, but restaurant quality tempura is difficult to get right in a home setting. Tempura, a Japanese dish of lightly battered and fried vegetables or seafood, is extremely popular for making fried food an unusually light eating experience compared to, say, southern-style buttermilk fry batter.

If you're committed to making tempura to a chef's standards in your home, the first and perhaps most important step is to choose the right oil. Tempura is a delicate dish, for fried food at least. Heavy oils with strong flavors will drown your tempura into a greasy, unsatisfying mess. So what oil do restaurants use?

Although there are alternatives that can do a decent job of frying tempura, the gold standard for using just one type of oil is Taihaku sesame seed oil — and no, you can't simply substitute it with any kind of sesame oil.

Taihaku sesame seed oil does not have much in common with the small brown bottle of sesame oil that gets drizzled into a home stir fry. Taihaku sesame oil is always made by naturally pressing un-toasted seeds; no chemicals or additives are used in its production, and raw seeds further guarantee a more mellow flavor that will allow the natural taste of your vegetables or seafood to shine through. (Taihaku would also be the best oil for tempura crunchies, a fun and crispy topping for almost anything.)

Unfortunately, because of its high quality and labor-intensive production, this specific variety is rather expensive, and rarely seen on store shelves outside of Japan. It can be bought online or in good import shops in the U.S., but usually at considerable cost. If you don't want to spend top dollar on Taihaku oil, neutrally-flavored and relatively low cost canola, vegetable, or sunflower seed oils can be decent substitutes, though they are less stable and will need to be replaced more frequently.