Easy Air Fryer Tempura Recipe - Mochi Mommy (2024)

Make Japanese tempura at home without the deep frying! This air fryer tempura recipe is quick, easy, and much healthier than the traditional deep fried version. You can use this air fryer version for both shrimp tempura or vegetable tempura, to satisfy all your tempura cravings.

What is Tempura?

Tempura is a Japanese food that consists of shrimp and/or vegetables dipped in a batter and then deep fried. You often find tempura served as a side dish at Japanese restaurants, part of bento boxes, or as a side for udon or soba. But tempura can also be a main dish served over rice, as in the dish tendon. Note: that should be pronounced “ten-don” with a long o, not like tendon the type of meat.

Also another note on pronunciation: I notice a lot of Americans pronounce tempura with the emphasis on the “pur.” They say “tem-PURR-ah.” But in Japanese, all syllables (supposedly) have an equal emphasis. If you ever learned to play music, think of it like the triplet rhythm pattern. The stress is equal on all three beats: TRI-PL-ETT, TRI-PL-ETT, TRI-PL-ETT. That’s how my piano teacher always used to say it. Except I guess in this case it’s TEM-PU-RA, TEM-PU-RA.

Anyway, that was kind of a weird tangent. Let’s get back to business.

Making Tempura at Home

Look, I need to just give it to you straight: making great tempura at home is SUPER HARD. Note: you can make a decent tempura at home, no problem, but a GREAT tempura? Almost impossible.

A great tempura has a lacy, crispy batter. It should be light, not soggy or thick or oily. It is an ART FORM.

A lot of Japanese cooking blogs have their own tricks for getting the best batter at home. Some use carbonated water. Others say you have to use water that’s so cold, it’s basically just a block of ice. Many also say you have to use chopsticks to whip air into the batter, but NOT TOO MUCH. Then you have to dip and fry your food right away or the batter completely deflates.

The instructions get so complex, it reminds of my phase where I thought I’d try making perfect French macarons at home. So many “secrets” to success. So many failures.

All that to say, when I want really really really good tempura, I just buy it from a restaurant.

HOWEVER.

Sometimes, you just want something homemade. Like I said earlier, you can definitely make a decent enough tempura at home. It’ll taste great, even if it doesn’t have the impossibly crispy light texture of tempura made by an artisan tempura chef.

But also like I said earlier, the instructions for making good tempura batter at home can be somewhat intimidating. And if I already know I’m setting my expectations a little lower for homemade tempura vs. restaurant tempura, why bother following a fiddly recipe? In fact, why bother deep frying at all?

And thus, may I present to you, my ultimate cheater tempura hack: AIR FRYER TEMPURA.

Adapting Tempura Recipes for the Air Fryer

The only tricky part about making tempura in an air fryer is figuring out, you guessed it, the batter. If you’re familiar with air fryer cooking, you know that battered foods don’t always do well in the air fryer. A thin batter will fly right off the food or drip right down to the bottom of the basket when the air starts circulating. Either that or the batter just causes all your food to stick to the basket or each other.

Air fryers are really best for breaded foods, not battered.

But just like in my air fryer mochiko chicken recipe, you can find ways around that. I make sure to use a batter that’s not too liquidy. Then, I dip my battered food in flour to dust the outsides. Et voila! A breaded food.. that still has batter.

The other tip I have for you is to make sure to slice your root vegetables thin! Seriously, aim for shy of 1/4 inch thickness, or your veggies won’t cook through by the time your batter is done frying.

Prepping Shrimp for Tempura

One thing I feel like I need to mention is that shrimp tempura is always straight. But, you may wonder, how is that possible when shrimp curl up when cooked? Well, part of the preparation for the shrimp is that you score the underside of the shrimp crosswise. Then you use your fingers to straight out the shrimp prior to cooking. It’s a little extra step that takes a few extra minutes. I always do it, but you can skip it, if you don’t care about presentation. It’ll taste fine.

I don’t really have great photos of that step for this blog post, but if you are a visual learner, there are great posts on how to do that at Just One Cookbook’s website.

What Fillings to Use for Tempura?

For protein, shrimp is probably one of the most common tempura fillings. (Fillings? Meats? I don’t know what to call the insides of tempura.) You could also use other seafood like squid. It would be extremely unusual to use other meat, but.. hey.. you do you.

As for vegetables, root vegetables are common, such as sweet potato, carrot, and lotus root. You can also use various squash, like kabocha. Bell pepper, broccoli, zucchini, and shiitake mushrooms are also great choices.

Can you see how the variety of tempura you make can be super fun and versatile? And can make a whole, well-rounded meal in itself? And can also be such a pain to prep? Yeah.

A Secret Ingredient for Tempura Batter?

Okay, okay, I know I harped on all these tricks for tempura batter before. But I do feel like I need to mention why my tempura batter ingredients look a little different from most that you’ll see on the internet.

The most common ingredients for tempura batter are flour, water, and egg. Sometimes you’ll see just flour and water.

But my batter omits the egg and uses Japanese mayonnaise instead!

Whaaaaat? I know.

Apparently, the Japanese mayonnaise helps emulsify the oils in the batter, so you never get soggy tempura. This also somehow means that you can mix the batter ahead of time and not worry about making it RIGHT before you fry. I don’t know. Serious Eats needs to do an article on tempura to figure out the science. I’m just a home cook.

Anyway, I actually learned about this trick from Chopstick Chronicles’s tempura recipe. And SHE learned about it from the official Kewpie Mayonnaise website! So it’s legit! I think? Or it’s just really great marketing.

Oh, one last note on the tempura batter. I add salt into my batter, which you won’t find in most other tempura recipes. The reason why I add salt is that we’re losing a lot of flavor from not deep frying. The salt is meant to counteract that.

How to Serve Tempura

Tempura is best served hot! You can eat it as a main dish over rice, or as a side dish. It works great in a bento box. Tempura also can be used as a side dish to noodles like udon or soba. But really, it’s your kitchen and your meal, so eat it however you want!

Typically tempura is also served with a dipping sauce called tentsuyu. Because traditional tempura doesn’t have any added salt into the batter, you get a lot of your salty flavor from the soy sauce in the tentsuyu. You can buy tentsuyu from a Japanese market, or you could also make tentsuyu from a concentrate (like the ones used to make soup noodle broths). Or you can make it from scratch.

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And that’s all I have to say about tempura! I hope you give this air fryer version a try! Let me know how it goes, or if you have any suggestions for improving my air fryer Japanese food game. You can leave me a comment below or come find me on Instagram.

Happy air frying!

More Japanese Air Fryer Recipes

If you enjoyed this recipe, be sure to check out my air fryer karaage, air fryer mochiko chicken, and air fryer sweet potato recipes as well!