Last week I made J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s Soy-Dashi Dipping Sauce for Tempura recipe from The Wok to go with his Tempura Vegetables or Seafood recipe.

The sauce is made by combining dashi, mirin, and soy sauce. I used hondashi for the dashi, because I have it on hand and it’s so easy.

The ingredients list pulped daikon radish to serve with the sauce, but Kenji doesn’t mention it in the directions. I put it in the bowl with the sauce where it just kind of floated around.

Of the four sauces Kenji provides for tempura, this is the traditional one. Megan thought that it didn’t have much flavor, but that matches with my experience in restaurants where the tempura sauce does not taste strongly at all. In that sense of providing some light seasoning to the tempura, I thought it did it well.

I am cooking my way through J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. Read more about it.