Sexy Deep Frying!

Dining is often thought of as a sensual experience. Gazing into a lover's eyes across a candle-lit table over the smells and tastes of an exotic meal is the kind of experience that kindles the sparks of romance into the flame of. . .

Ah, who am I kidding? I've never been that kind of guy. I once ate 60 chicken nuggets in 60 minutes. My picture is on the wall in a Spike's Junkyard Dogs restaurant for eating six 1/4-pound hot dogs in one sitting. Rather than ambiance or world-class cuisine; cheap, greasy, and/or "all-you-can-eat" are the types of things I look for in a restaurant. It is true that the way to my heart is through my stomach, but ordering me a pizza is likely to be just as effective as a home-cooked meal.

On the other hand, Rachel, author of the blog, Sexy Spoon, (Update: Sorry, Rachel's blog ended and this link became very inappropriate, so I removed it.) is much more in tune with the romantic nature of fine dining. She writes about dating and fine cuisine with vivid and eloquent descriptions. She's also a former classmate of mine, so I thought this would be a fun opportunity to garner respect for deep frying as a culinary art, eat a delicious meal, get a shout out on another blog, and hopefully impress a lovely young lady while doing all this. I want to show all my readers how to cook a classy deep-fried meal for that special someone. Deep frying can be sexy too; it doesn't just have to be associated with the Texas State Fair or adult-onset diabetes.

It wouldn't be easy though. For one, I've never considered myself a particularly good cook, and perusing Rachel's blog showed me that she has high expectations. Also, in a meal like this, we can't just eat each dish while standing over the deep fryer. I had to coordinate the various elements of the meal properly. Finally, presentation matters; I can't just serve it drying on a paper towel like most deep-fried treats.

Given her focus on food, dating, and relationships, I came up with what I thought was a great main course and dessert: deep-fried oysters and deep-fried chocolate-covered strawberries. Oysters, of course, are well known as an aphrodisiac, and chocolate-covered strawberries are a delicious and sensual food. And, if you'll remember my initial attempt at deep frying strawberries, I felt that adding chocolate to that would be a big improvement.

Perfect! I pitched the idea, and she was in. She was excited about both dishes, and she even had a recipe for beer-battered oysters she wanted to try. I wanted something else to round out the meal, so I suggested deep-fried avocados, which I learned are also believed to be aphrodisiacs. With that, the menu was all set.

I had never cooked any of these things before, so I did a fair amount of research on recipes for each of these things. For avocados, this recipe, seemed to be the most commonly suggested way to deep fry them.

Ingredients:
1 cup lager beer or ale (I used Yuengling again)
1 cup flour
2/3 tablespoon paprika
2 cloves garlic; large, chopped finely
1 pound avocados
Vegetable oil for deep frying
Salt -- as needed
1 cup salsa

Directions:
Beer batter: whisk together beer, flour, paprika and garlic until well blended; let stand at least two hours.

Peel, then halve, an avocado into six wedges. Dredge each wedge in reserved beer batter. Deep fry in 375F oil until golden brown, about three minutes. Drain well; season with salt.

For oysters, I looked at a bunch of very different recipes just to get a sense of what options I had, but the recipe Rachel suggested sounded very good, so we went with that one.

Then I looked over several recipes for chocolate-covered strawberries. I chose this recipe because the first comment under the recipe was written by a 13-year old, who said he or she easily made them in 10 minutes. That sounded like something I could handle. I could not find any evidence anywhere on the Internet of anyone deep frying a chocolate-covered strawberry. I had already decided that buttermilk pancake batter made the most sense though.

Before Rachel showed up, I made each of the batters so they could sit for the one to two hours the recipes called for. When she arrived, we were ready to heat the chocolate and dip the strawberries. This was a fun and delicious start to the afternoon, as we occasionally sampled our creations. The rest went into the fridge to cool down in preparation for frying.

Then we were ready to prep and start frying everything else. Rachel cut the avocados, while I started heating up two different batches of oil and boiling the oysters prior to frying them. Because I wanted stuff ready at the same time, I had the deep fryer full of vegetable oil and a pot on the stove full of peanut oil. As you know, I've had problems with deep frying on the stove before, so I bought a deep-frying thermometer, and this time vowed to actually use it.

I don't know what to look for in an avocado, so I picked out two of those big green ones (rather than the smaller, browner, wrinklier ones), but when we cut them open, they were definitely not ripe yet. They were fairly hard and I thought they tasted a little bitter. But after about three to four minutes or so in the deep fryer, they were amazingly soft and tasted like delicious warm guacamole, with no hint of the bitterness I'd tasted before. They practically melted in my mouth and were great dipped in salsa.

Also, having let the batter sit for two hours, I thought this made the consistency of the batter smoother, which led to a more even, golden brown coating than I'd had on some other things I've previously deep fried.

After we each sampled one or two, Rachel took over the avocado deep frying, and I started frying up the oysters. When I dropped the oysters into the oil on the stove, they scooted all around the pot, bubbling wildly. This is probably the most active an oyster ever gets in its entire existence. After cooking a few batches of a couple at a time, I realized I could add a bunch of them one after another, because their bubbling and moving slowed down a lot as they got fully cooked, which took about a minute and a half or so. This made it easy to spot and pick out the ones that were ready.

Then we prepared a nice looking plate of oysters on mixed greens, with cocktail sauce and a freshly cut lemon squeezed lightly on top. These were delicious. We easily polished off all the oysters I had bought. Being from the South, I've been to a lot of oyster roasts in my time, but these were perhaps the best I've ever had. This also made even more excited for future seafood deep frying, especially calamari and shrimp.

After a relaxed dinner, we were definitely satiated, but not too full to skip dessert. We brought the deep fryer back up to temperature and mixed up the pancake batter. We used bamboo skewers to put the strawberries in the oil and cook them evenly. Then, once they came out of the oil, we drizzled some melted white chocolate over them.

My chocolate decorating skills were not great at first. . .

But when I went back later and covered the remaining unfried strawberries, I had it figured out.

The deep-fried chocolate covered strawberries were totally awesome. The strawberries were warm but not too soft, but the chocolate inside the batter was deliciously melted all over it. Then the white chocolate on the outside pushed it over the top. A couple of these each was an excellent finish to a great meal.

As usual, everything was delicious. Not to toot my own horn, but I realized that while doing all this deep frying, I may actually have become a better cook than I'd thought. Despite these being among the more intricate recipes I've tried, everything looked good and tasted great, and I didn't fill the kitchen with smoke while deep frying on the stove. I have clearly come a long way in only nine months of deep frying.

And what'd she think of it all? Well, you can read her account here or find it by browsing under Men Who Cook Are Sexy. (Again, links have been removed, which is too bad. It was a really good blog post!). See, deep frying can be sexy!