More Appetizers (And Some Other Random Stuff)

Let's get right into this one, as it's been a week since my last post. We got the batter ready for the onion rings while the sweet potato fries were cooking. I used this recipe, which sounded easy enough. I had cut up a huge onion the day before, and I went with slightly larger rings than they said.
These were really good, but the batter didn't stick particularly well. Also, the onion rings all stuck together in one big clump. Still, they were really good. The casing was nice and crispy, and the onions themselves were very good.

I actually own two deep frying baskets, so I cooked them in two batches. For the second round, I decided to try double dipping, which has worked so well for a number of other foods I've deep fried. I also decided to try dipping the onions first into the flour and cornstarch mixture from the mozzarella sticks. This did make the batter stick on a little better, but not much, and I think it made the casing a little harder and crunchier. Overall, I liked the first bunch slightly better.

The next night, my other roommate was home, and I wanted to get him involved, since he had yet to deep fry anything. We were cooking burgers for dinner, so we figured we'd make some fries. With the sweet potatoes, I cut them by hand, but this time I used a mandolin slicer, since these potatoes were a little smaller. Using the mandolin slicer was a WAY better idea! They were all perfectly cut in about a minute. As per Emeril's recipe (We're kickin' it up a notch!), we soaked the potatoes in water, like the sweet potatoes, and waited a little bit (Emeril says at least 30 minutes.). While waiting, we started off with yet another batch of mozzarella sticks. Again they were awesome!

After that, we still had some time to kill, we had hot oil ready, and we had some breading mixture left over from the mozzarella sticks. So, we just started looking around for other stuff to deep fry in that would be good in that breading. First, we tried baby bella mushrooms and shitake mushrooms. We dipped them in the flour and cornstarch, then the egg, then the breading and garlic salt, and cooked them for just a couple minutes. I though both types of mushroom were great! The smaller ones are better, because they cook all the way through better than the larger ones. They get nice and warm and kind of juicy on the inside, with the tasty outer shell. I thought the garlic salt really added to this too.

Next, we tried deep frying some cherry tomatoes, again using the same mozzarella stick batter. These were also good -- soft and really warm -- but the batter hardly stuck at all.

Finally, we were ready for the fries. This was a very easy process, and this time I went with a better recipe that called for cooking them twice to get them crispier. I cooked them first at 325F for about 8 minutes, then took them out for about 10 minutes then put them back into 375F oil for 1-2 minutes. Afterwards, I added salt and pepper.

These fries were really good and complimented our burgers very well. Still though, they weren't particularly crispy. (Sorry there weren't more pictures!)

So, I learned a lot in this first foray into appetisers. I'm gonna keep working on a lot of these, and I'll, of course, keep reporting back. We'll try to get both types of fries crispier. Also, I think a future post will probably tackle beer-battered onion rings. And for all you fans of jalapeno poppers, I haven't forgotten about those! The mozzarella sticks were pretty much perfect, so I don't imagine I'll be tinkering with that recipe much. I will, however, try deep frying other cheeses. Keep sending in advice and suggestions! I have gotten some great suggestions so far, and I'll really try to test them all out at some point.