Guest Post!

It's been a while since my last post, but that doesn't mean I haven't been frying. I've just been too lazy to sit down and write a post. "Exactly how lazy?" you ask. So lazy that for this blog post someone else had to actually sit down and write the entire thing for me. And even then I didn't get around to posting it for another a week. Anyways, here we go:

You know how they say that behind every great man is a great woman? Hey, what's up, I'm Elise, Bobby's girlfriend. One day during Snowpocalypse 2011, Bobby made me a fried feast.

"Hey, I should take some pictures and make a blog post!" he said. "Are you actually going to write a blog post?" I inquired hopefully."Probably not," he conceded. "You're always right. And beautiful. Have you lost weight?" One thing led to another, and I offered to write it for him. If you want something done, you do it yourself.

(Editor's note: I don't really recall having this cnversation, but I guess an excellent memory is just another of the many great qualities of my amazing girlfriend. Also, within my blog, I kind of want to refer to Elise as "The Fry Gal" a la Bill Simmons.)

Enough with the introductions, let's get to the frying! First, we started off with some simple fried cheese. There wasn't any string cheese around, so we used a block of cheddar that needed to be eaten. I cut it into small rectangles suitable for breading and frying. The night before this, Bobby had made me some fried fish using corn muffin mix and flour instead of bread crumbs. It reminded me of the fried food at Cock of the Walk near Jackson, MS, a wonderful place where pretty much the only things on the menu that aren't fried are the cornbread, the collard greens, and the soda. So I suggested that we try using the cornbread in other situations to see if we found anything good.

The cheddar cheese was interesting to fry. It made the cheese very gooey and almost runny. Now we know why mozzarella is the cheese of choice for frying. The cheddar tasted very good, to be sure, but there wasn't that satisfying feeling of pulling a long string of melted cheese with your teeth. The cornmeal coating was a little bland compared to the bread crumbs. We didn't mix it with flour, so it was just straight up corn muffin mix, which kind of puffed up into a corn muffin when fried. You can see how thick the coating is on the pickle spear below:

I think the corn mix fit much better with the pickles than with the cheese. Again, it was like a very rich, dense corn muffin surrounding the pickle. Then for the sake of comparison, we coated the cheddar and pickles in bread crumbs. You can see how gooey the cheddar gets: The center of that was basically hot viscous cheese. "Hot viscous cheese:" Terrible word combination or awesome name for a metal band? You decide.

(Editor's note: after extensive negotiations with Dave Barry's lawyers, I was allowed to keep in the previous joke as long as I mentioned that his new book will be released on April 5.)

The pickles in bread crumbs were definitely more flavorful than the cornbread, but bread crumbs remind me too much of mozzarella sticks to really fit perfectly with the pickle flavor. They were also a little dry compared to the juiciness of the pickle within. I should also mention that Bobby had the foresight to dry the pickles on a paper towel beforehand, which made them much easier to coat.Now for some dessert! Bobby had some buckeyes from home that he wanted to fry up. Buckeyes are balls of peanut butter goodness dipped in chocolate.

(Editor's note: My Mom made these and I don't know the exact recipe, but I'm told they are actually really easy to make. Here's a recipe I found online that looks easy enough.)I whipped up some pancake batter and we used that to coat them. Then we stuck them on the end of some wooden skewers and put them right into the oil, turning while they cooked to get a nice even coating. They came out beautifully.With all that peanut butter and chocolate (not to mention the pancake batter), they were very rich. I think we could have let them cook a little bit longer to soften up the peanut butter; it stayed pretty solid after frying.

(Editor's note: I always think the peanut butter should get softer than it does when you deep fry it. Reese's peanut butter didn't soften either. A future post will cover Peanut Butter Patty Girl Scout Cookies, formerly "Tagalongs." And if that peanut butter doesn't soften, I'm going to deep fry a PB&J sandwich.)

They were nice and warm though, it reminded me of stealing peanut butter cookies fresh from the oven. We looked around the pantry to find other things to fry, and decided to try dark chocolate Lindt truffles. This didn't turn out so great.

(Editor's note: I was very worried I had given her a bad first impression of deep fried chocolate! She tried a deep-fried caramel cube soon after and loved it and then tried, and also loved, a Cadbury Caramel Egg. So I think those undid any damage done by the truffle.)The chocolate on the inside of the truffle was basically liquid. When I say "liquid," I don't mean just kind of runny like the cheddar cheese or melted like fondue chocolate. I mean it was about the density of water, but molten hot and chocolate flavored. It was delicious, but it was kind of a weird experience. It probably has something to do with the fat content of the chocolate we used, but overall I'm optimistic about the possibilities for frying chocolate. (Editor's note: Whew!) So anyway, hope y'all enjoyed reading my guest post as much as I enjoyed eating the food! I hope to be involved in many more deep-frying adventures!

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!

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...

Fried pickles

Now hush puppies and fried fish is a great meal, but, we need a vegetable to make it part of a balanced diet. So, I decided to deep fry some pickles. I've had these in restaurants as appetisers, and I've always enjoyed them, so I figured I'd give this a shot.

I have had deep fried pickles as both spears and as chips, and this first time, I decided to try spears.

I didn't save the exact recipe I used, but it was pretty close to this one. And I went with a flour coating of flour garlic salt, salt, and pepper. After doing all the dipping in egg, flour coating, egg, and flour coating again, you have to freeze the pickles for at least half an hour, then dip them into oil at 375.

It took just a few minutes to cook, while making sure they get cooked on all sides. These would not have won any beauty pageants -- they actually looked downright ugly. But they were delicious! You have to take careful bites at first though, because the pickle juice is extremely hot, and it will run everywhere. Also, the pickles are very good dipped in ranch.

So, after just one dinner, the deep fryer was 3 for 3, and my roommate and I didn't feel like we needed to eat again for a week.

Be on the lookout for my next post, coming very soon, which will chronicle dessert night. We deep fried Twinkies, Milky Way bars, a Cadbury Caramel Egg, and a chocolate covered cherry.