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!

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.