Wildcard!

I've had a lot going on in my real life, so deep frying took a back seat to holidays, travel, and work for a while. But hopefully, 2010 will bring a lot of opportunities for deep frying.

My roommate, Dan, has a friend who was a reader of the blog, and he was moving out of town, and wanted to experience this fun first-hand before he left. Since all my deep frying is done for the fans, I was happy to oblige.

A big reason for the success of my fancy romantic dinner post was my attention to detail and careful preparation. This night was quite different though. Dan just told him and another friend to come over with whatever they wanted, and we just figured we'd make it work. I made a beer batter, a cornmeal mix, and had flour, egg, and bread crumbs. Between those three options, we thought we could handle a lot of stuff.

We started with beer battered pickles. I really like the spears, but we decided to try slices, since they had more surface area. These were OK, but I thought there wasn't enough pickle in each bite. Nonetheless, they were quite tasty. For the first few, I just dipped them in the beer batter. Next I coated them in flour and then beer batter. Using the flour first was much better, because it made the beer batter coating much more even.

We then made some mozzarella sticks just to show our guests we actually knew what we were doing. Excellent as usual.

We then moved on to chili. Dan occasionally makes turkey chili for our apartment, and when he does, he buys a ton of ingredients, puts a full day of work into it, and basically fills our biggest pot to the brim with chili. The chili is excellent, and Dan is always very proud of his work. He takes it to Super Bowl parties, potlucks, and other get togethers.

The chili was the only thing that had been prepared for deep frying in advance. We mixed it with cheese and crumbled up cornbread to make the mixture thicker -- at least that was the theory. We then planned to dip balls of that into the cornmeal and fry it.

We had mixed results. I tried it twice and the first one actually worked fairly well. It was tough to form actual balls of chili, and then cover it totally with the cornmeal. I think the cornmeal batter mix was probably a little too thick. My second attempt did not maintain its structural integrity at all. The best picture we got of it was a bit blurry, but you can see a lot of cheese in there and some peppers, beans, and cornbread.

Luckily, not long after this night, I was given a recipe for deep frying chili that involves rolling chili in crushed up tortilla chips as the batter. We'll have to try that next time.

They had also brought some shrimp, which I've been wanting to try, but hadn't actually looked up any recipes for. These were pre-cooked and chilled, like you might serve at a cocktail party. We dipped them in the beer batter and fried them up.

These weren't that great. They were OK, but if you were at a restaurant and you ordered fried shrimp and they served this. . . you shouldn't go back to that restaurant. I'll look up some actual recipes next time I try shrimp.

Next up was Brussels sprouts. I tolerate Brussels sprouts, but I don't go out of my way to eat them, and I've never prepared them on my own. We steamed these first, and we were eating them partly as a break from fried food. (Yea, I know, it sounds crazy, but sometimes you need an unfried dish to cleanse the palette.) After eating a few steamed Brussels sprouts, they dropped one in the deep fryer with no batter at all. I don't have any pictures of that, but maybe that's for the best; as Dan said, it looked like a burn victim. It was shriveled up and blackened. I didn't try it, and I don't think it got good reviews. I think the beer batter might have been OK. Probably a tempura batter would be the best bet for Brussels sprouts.

Finally, we finished up with onion rings. These were actually really good. Dan's friend, James, took over and dipped them in the beer batter and dropped them in the oil one-by-one. In my last attempt at onion rings, they all stuck together in one big clump, but this time they were cooked separately and eaten one at a time. It's certainly not an efficient way to fry onion rings, but they were very tasty. They had a really nice crunch and flavor to them and the onion inside was nice and soft. If I can figure out how to scale this process up, I'll be very excited.
We had some other foods and desserts planned, but with all we'd eaten, we were too stuffed to do more. So unfortunately, we didn't get to apples, bananas, burritos, Twinkies, zucchini, and a few other fairly random foods we had assembled.

We had even put the bananas in the freezer to prepare them for dessert. Though we didn't get to it this time, it gave me a great idea for a future post: deep frying a Bluth banana!