Tag: deep fry

Categories
The Book Vegetables

156. Dry-Cooked String Beans p.523


I couldn’t find a recipe for this one online.

I was in a frying mood the night I made these beans and the onion rings. The combination of a fried appetizer, and a fried main course was just a little too much. This stir fry was more than greasy enough all by itself.

In this dish trimmed green beans are deep fried in a wok for 30 seconds, then drained. You then drain off most of the oil, and build a stir fry starting with garlic, red pepper flakes, and ginger, then add ground pork. Once the pork is browned the beans go back in to reheat. A mixture of sugar, salt, soy sauce, sake, and sesame oil is then poured over top along with a handful of scallion greens and stirred to coat. Put this on a bed of sticky rice and you’ve got dinner.

The stir fry itself was totally delicious, it was an excellent balance of ingredients, just spicy enough, and wonderfully complex and arromatic. However, the stir fried beans were a bit weird and greasy. I trimmed the ends of the beans, so there was an open tube down the middle of them. Some of those tubes filled with oil during frying, and made the dish much greasier than I would have liked. It’s possible that my oil temperature dropped too far, and the pressure of escaping steam wasn’t enough to keep the oil out. If so, more oil, or smaller batches of beans would have taken care of the problem. The recipe says that the point of the deep frying is to lock in the coulour of the beans, but blanching, and shocking them would have done the same thing. The exterior of the beans took on a funny wrinkled texture, but they remained firm and crisp, and nicely green.

I’d happily make an adapted version of this recipe, but I think the deep fried green beans are better left behind. There are lots of recipes for dry-cooked beans out there, so I’ll presume it’s a well respected technique, and suggesting that they kind of suck is probably insulting someone’s Grandmother’s cooking, but they just weren’t my bag. The rest of the dish was excellent, and simply replacing the frying for a blanching would probably solve my only criticism of the recipe. If it had been less oily, it would have earned 4.5 mushrooms, but as it is, I can’t give it more than three.

Categories
The Book Vegetables

155. Fried Onion Rings p.552


I can’t find the recipe for this one online.

Way back in the beginning of The Project, I mentioned that I’ve been a little gun shy about deep frying in my kitchen ever since I put some very wet potato wedges into a pot of massively overheated oil and turned my stove into a fireball. I try to do most of my frying outside on the barbecue’s side burner instead. The thought of raining fiery death upon the downstairs neighbors innocently sitting on their balconies hardly bothers me at all. It has the additional advantage of not stinking up the whole house. I take as many of my stinky cooking projects outside as I can, the hipsters next door may not appreciate it, but keeping my dining companion happy is much more important.

I’ve never made onion rings before, but I’ve eaten my fair share. I like rings with a thin crisp coating of batter, that stays attached to the onion that it doesn’t slither out along with your first bite. The batter should be flavourful on it’s own, but not excessively seasoned. Simplicity is a good thing, but these rings may have been a bit too simple. The recipe calls for sliced onions to be dipped in milk, and dredged in flour and salt, then fried at 370F for a couple of minutes. They passed the thin, crisp, and well attached to the onions test, but they were a little lacking in the flavour department.

I appreciate the minimalism of the recipe, lots of other onion rings recipes call for eggs, baking soda, cornmeal, bread crumbs, and other nonsense. A simple mixture of flour, salt, and a liquid should be quite sufficient. I would have preferred the liquid to be beer however. Using milk is nice, because you don’t have to wait for the beer to go flat before using the batter, but beer tastes so much better, and onion rings just don’t say dairy to me. I would have also preferred a little more salt mixed into the flour. Obviously you can add salt later, but it’s better when it’s in the batter. In fact, a batter would have been nice too. In this version you dip the onions in milk, dredge them in flour, dip them in milk again, then once more into the flour. It was a bit of an operation to do the double dredge, and it made a mess. Just mixing up a batter of the right consistency and sticking the rings in there wouldn’t be any harder, and it would be a lot faster.

I love that this recipe is in the vegetables section of the book. Finally my nine-year-old self’s “Eat your vegetables”, “But mom, onion rings are a vegetable” logic is getting the respect it deserves. For a first attempt at making my own rings, I was reasonably pleased with these, they were golden, crisp, and quite tasty. These aren’t the ultimate rings, but refining my perfect recipe is going to be a fun process.

Categories
Fish and Shellfish The Book

143. Fried Oysters Rémoulade p.329


The instructions for the oyster’s don’t appear online, but the rémoualde is the same one used in this recipe.

I tried a fried oyster for the first time about six months ago at a very posh restaurant. It was brought out as an unexpected treat between courses, and served with a fiery salsa. It had a crackling exterior that gave way with a burst of the the ocean, and revealed a delicately chewy, and still mostly raw oyster. We ate some wonderful food that night, but I think the impromptu oyster was my favourite part. I was hoping to match that experience with this recipe. In then end I didn’t quite succeed, but it’s a strong base for further experimentation.

For this recipe shucked oysters are dredged in a mixture of milk and egg, then coated with crushed saltine crackers. The oysters are deep fried for a couple of minutes, and served on their shells and topped with a rémoulade. The rémoulade is a simple mixture of mayonnaise, mustard, tomato paste, minced shallot, dill pickles, and scallion, with a dash of Worchestershire sauce, old bay seasoning, minced parsley, sugar, red wine vinegar, and a pinch of cayenne.

The rémoulade is absolutely excellent, and I’ll hear no word against it. It draws in a broad spectrum of ingredients, and covers its bases. It’s creamy, acidic, herbaceous, arromatic, and just a little bit spicy. It would be an ideal counterpoint to many simply flavoured seafood dishes. The use of Old Bay seasoning was intriguing. The Book doesn’t often call for prepared spices, particularly not a proprietary blend like Old Bay. I’d never tried the stuff before, and never seen it in stores here. Alton Brown is apparently in love with it, and I’d been interested to find out what the fuss was about. I was lucky to be cooking at my parent’s place, as it turned out my mother had a container in her pantry. Speculating on how old it was, would have been looking a gift horse in the mouth. I wasn’t blown away by Old Bay, but it certainly wasn’t bad. I was expecting it to be like those flavoured salts Food Network stars like to sell, but it seems to be more of an herb and spice blend. It was a worthwhile experience, but I’m not sure I’ll add it as a pantry staple.

The oysters in this recipe had some problems. I heated the oil to 375, and began the frying process. The recipe says they should cook for one-and-a-half to two minutes, but after about 45 seconds they were getting quite dark. By the time I got the oysters out they were much closer to mahogany than golden. The previous oyster recipe called for large oysters, so it was my fault when they overcooked, this one just calls for oysters in general. We have no way of knowing what size of oysters they tested this recipe on, but they must have been larger than mine. When there’s such wild variation in the sizes and cooking times of oysters, it’s pretty bad form not to give some indication of how that will affect the recipe. My oysters came out overcooked on the outside, which wasn’t a big deal, but they were cooked all the way through and mostly dried out on the inside. The fine texture of the oyster was lost, and replaced by chewiness. They still had good flavour, and the coating was nicely crisp. I’d certainly try oysters like this again, but I’d be sure to get them out of the oil significantly earlier.

These would work well at a cocktail party, or as a first course. The book suggests that they could be a main course as well, but I think they were a bit too rich to make a meal of. This recipe had its problems, but overall they were very enjoyable. With a little tweaking of the oysters and cooking time I think they could have been fantastic.