Corn Dogs

I've been excited for this one ever since I got a deep fryer. I love corn dogs. I used to eat a ton back in high school. I think my family used to buy them in packs of 20 or maybe 40; I don't exactly remember, I just know we always had a lot of them around. They microwaved in 1:05, (The package said one minute, but the extra five seconds really puts them over the top!) and they were basically the perfect snack for late night after a party, in the afternoon, and once in a while I even ate them for breakfast. After hearing this, my high school baseball coach once remarked, "You're going to die a very young man."

Upon starting the blog, I realized a lot of stuff gets deep fried on a stick. But, ridiculously, I couldn't find normal popsicle sticks anywhere in Boston. After checking out several supermarkets, a Target, and a craft store, I hadn't found any. This delayed my first attempt at corn dogs until I finally found 50 in a hardware store. Soon after, my Mom found a ton at a dollar store (200 for a dollar!). Aren't Moms great! Bottom line is, I now have 650 popsicle sticks, so that shouldn't be a problem for me for a long time.

Once I had the popsicle sticks, I bumped corn dogs up to the top of my deep frying list. You can find a lot of different corn dog recipes out there. This recipe is amazingly easy -- exactly what I am looking for in a recipe! And it was perfect since we always keep Jiffy corn muffin mix in the house. I'll even post the full recipe here for you:

1 pkg. Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix
1 pkg. hot dogs
Mix corn muffin mix following directions on box. Roll hot dogs in batter. Deep fry.

Rolling them in the corn muffin mix was easy enough, although it was slightly challenging to get a full and even coating over the dogs. Like my last post, I used one Hebrew National dog and one Nathan's dog.

The only problem is that it didn't say what temperature to use. Normally, I would just go straight to 375F with that, but since I had just cooked the rippers at 350F, I decided to put these at 350F as well. I think this wasn't the right call. At first, the corn dogs looked like they were cooking great. But, a couple minutes in, the corn meal opened up and fell off the dogs. I suspect that if I had cooked them at 375F, then they would have hardened a little more on the outside faster, and they would have stayed on. So, although I haven't proved it yet, from this, I may have stumbled upon another rule of thumb for deep-frying: When in doubt, max out the temperature (375F). I am looking forward to trying this again soon, and seeing if that works. If it doesn't work, my next variation will be to roll the hot dogs in flour first to help the corn meal stick.

Despite them falling apart slightly, I enjoyed these a lot. It was a little bit of a letdown, since I had been so excited, but I am now motivated to try these again soon and get it right. Again, I liked the Nathan's dog more than the Hebrew National one, but both were good.

After the cooking the tempura veggies that weren't that great, the rippers that didn't rip, and now the corn dogs that fell apart, I was feeling like I was in a bit of a deep frying slump. To help get me back on track, I used some of the corn meal batter I had mixed to make hush puppies. These were excellent just like last time, and right off the bat, I was able to make nice round ones, so I felt good about that.

I was still left wanting to try something else though. I took a quick look through the refrigerator, and saw some leftover macaroni and cheese. This recipe for deep fried mac and cheese specifically mentioned chilling it overnight before coating and deep frying, so I felt good about this one. Also it is a bread crumb recipe, which I think always get the job done.

When I removed chunks of the mac and cheese from the container, they would start to fall apart almost instantly. When I put them in the flour, they fell apart even more. Then when I moved the loose flour covered macaroni pieces into the egg, they still didn't form easily into clumps. BUT...once I put them into the bread crumbs, I could easily shape them into small little golf ball sized spheres. I cooked these at 350F too (the recipe says so).

These were really good! And, they were made with several day old mac and cheese leftovers. I can only imagine how good they would be if the mac and cheese was a little fresher and a little cheesier. The next day my roommate and I made more of these with the remaining leftover macaroni, and they were again very tasty. So, bread crumbs came to the rescue again in hopefully snapping me out of a mini slump.

For my next post, a friend who is an avid reader of my blog, a blogger herself, and a fellow deep frying enthusiast was visiting from out of town and was excited for the chance to cook something with me. She'll provide some comments as well as we try a new take on two classic kids' breakfast favorites: Pop Tarts and Toaster Strudels.