A Deep-Fried Eggstravaganza

I've been wanting to do this post for a while. . . My friend, Hal, has repeatedly requested deep-fried hard boiled eggs, and I thought that it'd be fun not just to deep fry a hard boiled egg, but to eggsperiment (See what I did there? Get used to it.) with all sort of types of eggs.

While Hal was visiting, we deep fried some hard boiled eggs with a Sunday morning breakfast. We initially tried both a pancake batter shell and a breadcrumb shell. The consensus was that the breadcrumbs were a better eggsterior, although in both cases, the actual egg tasted pretty much the same.

Eggsibit A: Hard boiled egg with pancake batter

Eggsibit B: Hard boiled egg with breadcrumbs Armed with that knowledge, for Easter this year, I decided to finally have the event I'd been looking forward to: an Eggstravaganza where I'd deep fry eggclusively eggs.

For the Eggstravaganza, I stuck with the flour, egg, and breadcrumb coating, but I planned a bunch of different varieties to try. I hard boiled six eggs to start, and turned two into egg salad and two into deviled eggs. The remaining two I saved for Scotch eggs, which I was quite eggcited to try.

The deviled eggs were made with a little mayonnaise, dijon mustard, and the egg yolks mixed together and put back into the egg whites, with a little paprika sprinkled on top. There are more eggsotic recipes out there, but I kept it simple.

To make egg salad, I diced up the eggs, added in mayo, mustard, relish, salt, pepper, and paprika. For both the deviled eggs and the egg salad, there are a lot of recipes out there. Just find one that looks good to you.

Once the eggs were prepared, I brought the oil up to temperature (375F). I carefully rolled the deviled eggs in the flour, egg wash and breadcrumbs. Then I put them in the oil for a couple minutes.

The eggs salad was a little tough to coat with batter because it kind of fell apart as I rolled it in the flour and egg wash. But once it got into the breadcrumbs, it could be reshaped into bite-sized pieces easily enough. They took just a couple minutes in the oil.

Eggsibit C: Egg salad

These were eggcellent. I think egg salad in a breadcrumb shell is a clear improvement on the egg salad sandwich. It didn't drastically change the egg however. And a few friends who sampled it enjoyed it as well.

Eggsibit D: Deviled eggs These were eggstraordinary. A few people tried them, and they were even better received than the egg salad. Everyone eggstolled their virtues. These were also ready in about 2-3 minutes. The yolks of the deviled eggs were what separated them from the egg salad. All of the real flavor was in one spot, surrounded with the egg white and a crunchy shell. The yolks were very soft and warm, while the egg white stayed a little cooler.

The Scotch eggs were the main course. For these, I removed the casing from two sausages, and I packed the meat all around two hard boiled eggs until none of the egg was eggsposed. One sausage was just about eggsactly the right amount of meat for one egg.

Eggsibit E: Scotch eggs

The first one I made was slightly undercooked (not something you want to do with pork!). Keep the egg in the oil for a while to really get it cooked through properly. For the second Scotch egg, I kept it in until the outer shell was really dark. That one was cooked though better, but I still could have it left in longer. I would recommend about 10 minutes to get it thoroughly cooked. Also, my deep fryer wasn't quite full enough to submerge the Scotch egg, so I had to keep rolling it around to make sure all of it got cooked.

The Scotch eggs were eggceptional. Sausage and egg is a great combination anyway, but this was eggstra tasty with the added crunch of the shell. Yet again, the egg is protected from getting too hot by the sausage eggsoskeleton surrounding it.

After the Scotch eggs, I wanted to eggspand into non hard-boiled eggs. So, I carefully poured the remaining egg wash (essentially scrambled eggs) straight into the fryer. It went crazy. It eggsploded, bubbling wildly, and then solidified into a layer on top of the oil.

Eggsibit F: Scrambled eggs
Despite how messy it looked, it was surprisingly easy to eggstract this clump of egg from the deep fryer, and it was just a super oily, overcooked mass of scrambled eggs. A few people tried it, but it was not a high-point of the evening. Whatever; I'm no eggspert.

The final test was cracking an egg and carefully pouring the insides straight into the oil. This one sunk all the way to the bottom, with small streams of egg white rising to the top. After a minute or so, it all floated up, and learning my lesson from the last attempt, I was careful not to over cook it.

Eggsibit G: Fried eggI removed this in good time (probably about a minute and a half), and it looked and tasted like a fried egg. The yolk was still runny, just like I like it. Also, after how the scrambled eggs turned out, I patted this one down with a paper towel to remove as much eggcess oil as possible.

Finally, I finished up with a Cadbury egg for dessert. It's a dessert I've made before, and it was eggsquisite, as always. I was a bit eggsausted at this point, so I didn't get another picture.

While I wish I could say I spared no eggspense and eggsplored all the possibilities, there are a lot more types of eggs, I didn't get to try. I also didn't think of eggplant until afterwards. But all in all, the event definitely eggceeded my eggspectations.

Veggie Night

I made a big list of vegetables I wanted to deep fry at some point (a subset of the HUGE list of all foods I want to deep fry). At the top of the list was zucchini. In my high school, the cafeteria made deep fried zucchini sticks, which everyone really liked. Actually, even better were the vegetable sticks, which just had a bunch of ground up vegetables mashed into stick form and deep fried. They also deep fried okra occasionally, but okra is tougher to find up North. Since I was deep frying zucchini, I got some squash too, because I figured there were some economies of scope there. I rounded out the meal with broccoli and cauliflower, which I have also had deep fried before and enjoyed. Other vegetables that I'll deep fry at some point include: corn (one of the ingredients in the above-mentioned vegetable sticks), green beans (one of my roommates raved about these), okra, and a few more.

I found this recipe for zucchini and squash, which called for just dipping the two in a cornmeal and flour mixture. That sounded good, since that's how I cook fried fish, but I was surprised in didn't include an egg wash in the process. Nonetheless, cut the veggies into sticks and discs and tried it out. These were good.

Then I went back and made an egg wash and just inserted that step into the process for round two. These were also really good. This time the outer shell really reminded me of the fried fish I love cooking. Others eating with me were split on whether this was better or worse than the first batch. We were also using ranch as a dipping sauce, and I thought that was very good with all of these.
Then, I tried using breadcrumbs. I couldn't find a recipe that called for breadcrumbs, but as you have no doubt gathered from my recent posts, I LOVE dipping stuff in egg, then bread crumbs and deep frying it. It hasn't failed yet. This batch blew the others away. It wasn't even close. As much as I liked the first two preparations, these were outstanding. I just skipped the recipes for the broccoli and cauliflower and just dipped these in an egg wash, then breadcrumbs. Also, I bought the biggest container of breadcrumbs I could find at the store, so I should be stocked for a while. Of the broccoli and cauliflower I prepared for deep frying, I steamed half of it before deep frying and the other half just went into the fryer raw, so I could test whether that had any effect on the overall taste.

Both batches were excellent, and there was no discernible difference between steaming the stuff beforehand or not.
All of this was so good with the breadcrumbs, that I had the epiphany that looking up all these recipes and trying all these different preparations might be over thinking it all. I think it breaks down like this: There are normal foods and there are sweets. All the sweets can probably be covered in pancake batter and deep fried and all the normal foods can probably be just dipped in an egg wash and then covered in breadcrumbs. for deep frying. All the other in-depth recipes may be unnecessary. Sure, there will be occasional other things to try, but I think this is a good, general rule of thumb.

While contemplating how good everything is with breadcrumbs, I thought, "I really want to deep fry a pickle in breadcrumbs. Wait...I have pickles! I'll do this right now!" And I did. I didn't worry about the detailed recipe I followed last time, I just dipped it in the egg, then the breadcrumbs and fried it. It was awesome! And totally easy! It's in the foreground of the picture below.

Since I know you all look to me for thorough research on all things deep fried, I'll keep looking at other recipes when frying new things. But I am going to be partial to the ones that involve breadcrumbs. And don't worry, I still want to try other types of batters, like beer batter.

For dessert, we deep fried a few more Oreos (why not?) and a Cadbury Caramel Egg, so I could get a picture. In the first picture, there's a normal (half) Cadbury Caramel egg next to it. I was about to deep fry that one, but it just looked too delicious and I started eating it on the trip from the fridge to the deep fryer. The next one made it into the deep fryer intact, and was very delicious.

Next time, I'll put my new breadcrumb deep frying theory to the test with fried fish. This is a tough first challenge, because all my life I have made fried fish the same way. It will be quite a shock if I like this new way more. We'll see what happens...

Dessert night

Our last meal was a huge success, but we had to eat it in shifts, since you can realistically only deep fry one thing at a time. This time, I decided my friends and I should eat a light, balanced dinner, but save room for dessert and go crazy there.

In preparation, I bought: Twinkies, fun size Milky Way bars, Cadbury Caramel Eggs, chocolate covered cherries, cookie dough, and Oreos (Doublestuffed, obviously). I also got powdered sugar and fudge topping to put on our desserts. Sorry to say we didn't get to all of these in one night, but don't worry, they'll all be covered in due time.

I printed out recipes for each, and all four had different batter recipes. We decided to start with Twinkies. I'd tried a deep fried Twinkie in Vegas years ago, and I liked it, but I don't remember it being truly incredible. Anyways, I went with this recipe.

You have to chill the Twinkies (and other stuff) for a while before cooking, so I had put the Twinkies in the freezer, and the other stuff in the fridge overnight.

The batter was 1 cup milk, 2 tbsp. vinegar, 1 tbsp. vegetable oil, 1 cup flour, 1 tsp baking powder, and a dash of salt. make that into a smooth, blended mixture, as seen below (Hey, we have pictures now!)

Then, put a popsicle stick into the twinkie and dip it in the batter. Since I only had wider sticks, those caused some of the Twinkies to break a little bit. That was more of a minor annoyance than a problem, but still worth mentioning. Having the popsicle sticks really helps you get the whole Twinkie fulled covered in batter. It'll start coming off on your fingers if you have to hold them in your hands -- which is tasty, but a little messy and it means the Twinkie won't be totally covered

Once you have totally covered the Twinkie, carefully dip it into oil heated to 375 (I'm still new to this, but it looks like pretty much everything needs 375, which is the max on my fryer.).

These float also, so keep them rotating in the oil. I could only really fit one at a time, but later I cooked some without the sticks, and then I could fit two.

After three to four minutes, these were a beautiful golden brown. In Vegas, I think I pretty much covered mine in sugar, chocolate, sprinkles, etc., but here I didn't want to overdo it. I went with a light dusting of powdered sugar to enhance, but not overpower the Twinkie flavor.

These were incredible! Everyone loved them! they were crispy on the outside, but soft and gooey on the inside, with the creamy center warmed perfectly. We each had one, which, it turns out, is a decent sized dessert.

Below is a pretty awesome cross-section.

The recipe I linked to above also includes a berry sauce to put on the Twinkies. It sounded good, but that will have to wait for another day.

Even though we were kind of full, and very satisfied, we pressed on. Though the Milky Way recipe called for a slightly different batter, we just went ahead and dipped them into the leftover Twinkie batter. Ditto for the Cadbury Caramel Egg (They were out of Cadbury Creme Eggs, but that was ok because I like the caramel ones more.) and the chocolate covered cherry. I'm a bit lazy, but, hey, if the Twinkie batter is wrong, I don't want to be right.

The Milky way bars were really good. They came out of fryer after a couple minutes oozing caramel, as did the Cadbury Egg. Sorry to say I don't have pictures of these. One time a Milky Way bar totally fell out of the batter shell, and I had to fish it out and re-batter it. It still turned out fine. The cadbury egg was excellent too. The chocolate gets really soft and the caramel inside is amazing. My hand was literally shaking as I ate these. Maybe that's a reflection of how much sugar I had just consumed, but I think it was the pure joy I felt from the entire experience.

The only blemish on the night was the chocolate covered cherry. I guess the whole thing wasn't cold enough, and the cherry fell out of the chocolate and hardened from the hot oil. and the remaining chocolate-batter mess wasn't that good. But, after 2 nights, the deep fryer is 6 for 7 overall, and I'll do some research and figure out how I can successfully make a deep fried chocolate covered cherry.

I still have a few more upcoming posts of stuff I've already cooked that don't have pictures. Sorry about that! I will, however, start carefully documenting everything for all future deep-frying.

Up next: Oreos