Back in action! And in 1/2 of the time it took me to do a follow-up fry last time!

This week's high-frying feast was brought on in part by Stacey L, who has been hounding me relentlessly ever since I got the deep fryer to let her see how deliciously fatty foods are created. She tossed out an idea to try onion rings, but in the spirit of always taking things to the NEXT LEVEL, we decided to up the ante and make an AWESOME BLOSSOM.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of an awesome blossom, they are essentially a whole onion cut into a flower-like shape and then deep-fried. You can find them at chain restaurants like Chili's and Outback, and when done by professionals, they look like this:

Hot damn does that look good!

Now, just deep-frying a giant onion hardly counts as a meal unto itself, so in addition we decided to throw in a pair of cheeseburgers into the mix, also deep fried in order to preserve the 100% crispy theme.

Friends! Fryers! Faithful followers! Read on, and discover the hardships and joy of:

DEEP FRIED CHEESEBURGERS AND AWESOME BLOSSOM ONIONS

To begin, there are a few good recipe choices out there in internet-land, but the one we settled on was here (Notice the awesome diagram included on the right)

Preparation was again fairly simple, due to the fact that each time I fry there are plenty of ingredients left over from the previous experience. My shelves were already stocked full of flour and baking powder, the only thing I needed from the supermarket were some spices (in my quest for more flavorful batter), and the onion.

However, in my haste to get the spices I nearly forgot the onion...

... and then in my haste to run back and get the onion, I forgot the cheeseburgers.

Sigh.

I hate shopping.

Anyway, after 3 trips to the supermarket for only 5 needed ingredients, we had them all laid out and were good to go!!!

Mmm... delicious!

First things first, we mixed up the dipping sauce. This was fairly easy. We mixed up what the recipe told us to, dashed in a handful of spices and other goodies, stirred it all together into a wonderful paste and then stuck it in the fridge to cool. Pretty simple.

Next up came the batter preparation for the onion. This differed slightly from normal deep-frying conventions. We had to prepare 2 separate bowls, one with the dry ingredients and one with the wet ingredients. Once these were mixed and prepared they are supposed to be applied one at a time to the onion.

Again these steps were fairly straightforward. The 'wet' ingredients were just eggs and milk
(the exact combination I put on my cereal
every morning!), and the dry ingredients
were mostly flour and a variety of spices.

Once these were made and mixed to my
liking, we moved on to the first daunting
step in the process:

THE ONION!!

Giant onion of DOOM!

Now to prepare the onion takes a little bit of skill with a knife. Not a lot of skill, but basically the same amount of skill most people have that cook food on a regular and healthy schedule. Unfortunately this category does not include me. You can say my skill level hovers right around 'clumsy' at best. Now, if I were attacked by ninjas in a sword-fight, that may be an entirely different story, but in terms of food preparation... not so much.

Still, I followed the directions step-by-step and kept as steady a hand as I could.

The 1st step was to cut the top and bottom 3/4 inch off the onion.

Next up you take a small knife and cut out the core. Or in my case you take a large knife and awkwardly gouge out something that vaguely looks like a circle from the top-down.

Then, keep a firm grip on the onion and cut it in half (but don't cut all the way to the bottom, stop cutting about 3/4 of the way down). Take that half and cut it in half again, then again, then again, until you feel you've either: ( a.) got thin enough slices, ( b.) can't see because your eyes are watering too badly, or (c.) cut deeply into your index finger.

The end result should look something vaguely similar to this:

Slice-o-riffic!

Now flip on your fryer and let the grease begin to heat! While the oil is warming up, CAREFULLY start to peel back the onion layers. I found this to be a bit tricky, I think partly because I cut too deeply into the onion at sections and instead of peeling back, some of the petals threatened to snap off. They say it's important to try and separate each layer of onion as best as possible, as the petals tend to group together, and it turns out the recipe was right and I didn't spend as much time on this as I should have, which came back to haunt me later.

The oil should be nearly hot by this point, so "batters-up!" (hehe...)

Battering objects still causes quite a bit of perplexion for me... as most recipes tell you how to make enough to batter a small handful of whatever objects you are deep frying, but it's never enough to really cover anything. In this case, I had a giant onion and a large pan, but only a thin layer of eggy-milk-mix. Now I could have made a TON of eggy-milk-mix and totally submerged the onion, but then I would have ended up with about a half gallon of wasted dairy product that I'd have to throw out later.

I decided the best choice would be to lay the onion out in a big flat pan, and I would pour the wet mixture on it and then scoop it up and continue to re-pour as much as possible, since I didn't have enough to dunk-and-drown the onion.

So I poured the wet mixture over the onion, and then gently sprinkled it with a dusting of dry.


Then it was dunked again in the wet (and gathered, and re-dunked) and then sprinkled once more with the remains of the dry.

Now our onion was covered, our oil was hot, and our spirits were high! We dropped that bad-boy in the oil and watched it bubble like crazy! We did a little happy-dance, set the timer for 10 minutes and turned to the next phase of our dastardly plans!!! THE BURGERS!!!

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble!

Burgers Ahoy:

While the onion was burbling and smacking away, we plugged in the OTHER miraculous invention that helps keep me alive (no, not the can opener or the iron lung), the George Foreman Grill!! I've got a sweet G2 grill (grill and griddle combo which was ALSO a frickin awesome gift from the roomates a few birthdays prior), and I dropped on a pair of bleu-cheese and bacon patties.

While these grilled we made the batter, following essentially the same steps as we did for the twinkie batter the previous fry-day.

With immaculate timing, we pulled out the onion which was now golden, hucked the burgers from the grill into the batter and then threw them into the oil to congeal.

And since health is important to us, we even included lettuce-wrap burgers, for those who are trying to watch their carb intake or their figures!

Green = health

Sadly, I have no idea how people at sandwich places get their wraps to stay together, the lettuce turned out to be surprisingly awful at holding things, even after repeated attempts were made to tie, knot, and even toothpick-stab them in place.

THE GRAND RESULT:

TASTE & OPINION

Okay, okay, first off, I KNOW they look like alien terrors from the deep. Their appearance is slightly odd, and could possibly frighten small children. This was apparent on the onion as soon as I took it out of the fryer. The regular deep-fried cheeseburger looks about what you'd expect (roughly the size and shape of a burger), and the burger-wrap came out looking like some sort of tempura-nightmare, mostly due to the lettuce unwrapping itself as it fried.

The reason why the onion came out looking so deformed was mostly because I didn't peel the petals out far enough and I didn't spend enough time separating the layers. When it fried, instead of frying each individual part, they clumped together and hardened in big greasy globs, which gave the onion its terrifying appearance.

In terms of taste however, they were right-on. The onion was slightly undercooked, giving the onions a sort-of grilled taste, especially those in the middle of the fried-clumps. Luckily grilled onion tastes great, and having a flavorful dipping sauce on hand (for once) pushed it to the top. The burgers were cool, it felt strange eating them without a bun, but hey, I'm always a fan of crispy-meaty-goodness. We even took apart the tempura-burger and dunked everything in the dipping sauce and devoured the meat and lettuce.

By the meal's end, there was nothing left but crumbs, and no disgruntled taste-testers! True, it wasn't as exotic as the deep-fried twinkies, or as pretty as anything else you'd find anywhere, but hey, for a first attempt at a more-inclusive restaurant-style meal, not too shabby!!

RECAP OF LESSONS

1. Spices help everything
2. When making an Awesome Blossom, really take care with the cutting and spreading of the onion. Unless you want to make a freaky Halloween onion. Then just go nuts, I guess.
3. Burger-wraps are insanely hard. But then again this is coming from somebody who can't even wrap the simplest of christmas presents without a lot of tape and swearing. Still, if anybody out there can package a sandwich or burger using leaves of lettuce, my hat goes off to you.
4. Making foods that involve different types of batter/preparation leads to a LOT of dishes. It's far easier to make one batter that ALL the different types of foods can be dunked in, but then you get less variety. No matter what, make sure you've got plenty of pots and bowls on hand.

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There you have it folks! This is where I leave off!! I hope these posts are helpful, either in terms of your own deep-fried experiments or maybe to help pass a few minutes of boredom at work!

Please keep on submitting your comments, as well as ideas for more recipes! I feel like I'm just getting comfortable wading around in the shallows, soon it will be time for me to put on the diving suit, fill my shoes with concrete, and plunge down off the deep-end.

So leave me suggestions! Dig up recipes! And join me once again a few weeks from now, when Your Royal Fry-ness returns for his next bout in the ring!!!!

Sincerely,

~ Fryer Lawrence

Hey there and howdy, I know it's been a REALLY long time since the last post, and I want to apologize for that. I've got a slew of content and updates planned for this site, I'm just hard pressed to find time these days. That being said, I'm trying to get a planned update system going on, perhaps every other Sunday or something, I just have to get through crunch-time here first.

But, carrying on... this weekend's deep fried delectables were:

(drumroll please)

DEEP FRIED CALAMARI & TWINKIES
(The combination of heroes)

My latest frying adventure started with the search for the Next Great Treat. The last frying endeavor took many more hours than I anticipated from start to finish, and I knew going into this weekend's event that I was far more limited with my schedule, so I had to come up with something fairly quick and easy. That being said, I didn't want to do anything too straightforward or boring, as there is no fun in that.

After scouring the web I decided that calamari was a quick and easy, but also a somewhat different type of fried dish. Still, I felt that wasn't enough, and in a bold last-minute add-on I decided to throw in some deep fried twinkies as a dessert (after all, that was one of the reasons the almighty birthday fryer was bestowed upon me to begin with).

I jotted down the recipes, which can be found here:

Deep Fried Twinkies (scroll down near the bottom)
Deep Fried Calamari (a very very simple and basic recipe)

The pile o' ingredients

The ingredient list was MUCH easier to come by this time around, partly because I had many of the ingredients in the kitchen from last time, and partly because I wasn't the one doing the actual shopping this time (thank you dedicated fan fryette!).

Armed with fresh twinkies and "squid tubes and tentacles", we set off to work!

The twinkies went into the freezer to chill for as long as possible, the oil was poured and left heating up, meanwhile the cutting board was brought out and the lovely squiddy bits were put under the chop!

Squid tubes and tentacles

Basically the squid came in two parts, the big floppy head (the "tube") and it's piles of squiddy legs (the tentacles). The tubes had to be cut into sections, creating the round rings that you see when you order calamari.

The squid was all squishy and slimy, and we bought 1lb of it, so there was much cutting to be done. By the end there we had a large pile of sliced and diced squid bits.

Reconstructed squid

Hi-ya!

The next part was more fun. Before the squid could take their hot oil bath, they had to be dusted in corn starch first. Before being covered in starch, squid bits are squishy and jelly-like, but afterwards they feel AWESOME. It's hard to describe, but it's like playing with a bunch of rubbery deflated balloons, but not regular balloons, like... AWESOME balloons that are just so damn malleable. Okay, it's hard to describe, but my recommendation is to go out and TRY it, it's really quite fantastic and I could have been there playing with it all day if I wasn't under time-pressure.

After the cornstarch, all that was left to do was basically dunk the calamari in the fryer. Oh man did they bubble and hiss! It was awesome! Like my own personal cauldron of evil deliciousness!


The recipe said to only keep them in for about a minute on high-heat, but I kept checking and they still weren't turning brown. They stayed a pale-white color. I kept checking and kept checking, and after about 5 minutes I decided if they hadn't turned golden by now, they just weren't going to, and hauled them out.



Upon a taste test they were cooked too long and were REALLY dry and crunchy, like popcorn, and not chewy like calamari should be. So the second batch (the other half-lb) we followed the instructions better and only kept them in there for about a minute and a half, and they had a much better consistency.


Overall they were edible, just very VERY bland. Probably the most boring calamari I've ever had. Still, they served as good munchie food while we prepared the next leg of our fantastic voyage.... the TWINKIE BATTER.


It turns out that making deep fried Twinkies is almost the same as making corn dogs, so I put my prior experience to use! It all starts with the batter, mixing the wet ingredients in one bowl and the dry in another, and then the two are blended together and stirred until smooth. Since my corn dog batter was a bit bland, I decided to throw in some extra sugar... which in hindsight is pretty unnecessary because unlike a hot dog, Twinkies come packed with an excessive amount of sugar to begin with.

After the batter was mixed it was time to surgically insert the popsicle sticks.

And then the twinkies were dunked and battered as
evenly as possible.

Again, similar to corn dogs, the trickiest part is trying to evenly batter the twinkies and then move them into the hot grease without dripping everywhere, and without the batter slipping off one side, or globbing out in unusual patterns once it is dunked. Also similar to the problems faced with corn dogs are the fact that Twinkies are light and they float, meaning their natural tendency is to bob on one side and not cook the other. So you have to sort of hold them down under the oil and turn them around as evenly as possible, without poking great holes in the batter before it hardens and sets.

Other than the buoyancy, it was pretty simple from here on out. Twinkies only need to be deep fried for 3 or so minutes, and I think in our last batch we only kept them in there for a minute and a half.

If you don't smoothly batter and rotate them, they take on a bizarre lumpy surface texture and look sort of alien-like, but don't be alarmed, it doesn't affect their deliciousness.

And boy... are they TASTY.

Upon first taste I nearly went into cardiovascular shock. I could feel my pupils dilate and the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Talk about a sugar rush! These babies are heaven-sent. After so much of my deep frying endeavors ending in blandness, these things were a sweet shot to the taste buds. Upon seeing my positive reaction, a line started to form out the kitchen door as people were eager to try for themselves. Resisting the urge to black-out, I quickly fried up another 3 series of pairs and handed them around for the masses to enjoy.

What is interesting about deep frying Twinkies is that the cream filling boils up and gets absorbed into the fluffy lining. So the sides become intensely sweet, and you have an empty pocket in the middle. I suppose this is why they recommend freezing or chilling them first, I think it helps preserve the insides better. The final pair we fried for half the time, and those actually still had cream inside, it was warm and sugary, like melted marshmallows in Smores, and after two of them the world started to get a bit spinny.

From that point onward, I shared out whatever I had left and then unplugged the fryer to cool down.

LESSONS LEARNED

1. For the Calamari, the magic is all in the batter. Plain corn starch = bland. If you want delicious calamari, add lots of spices and stuff into the batter, and also make a neat sauce dip on the side for when they are served. Also, make sure to only keep them frying for a minute or two, regardless if they don't turn all golden.

2. Deep fried Twinkies are a godsend, and really... well... words just fail me. Just be careful not to eat too many, or keep some insulin nearby, as they could easily trigger instant diabetic shock. I mean, these things are so damn sugary that after cleaning up I had to sleep off their effects. Don't plan on driving or operating heavy machinery after eating them.

OVERALL

Another round of frying I consider to be a success! I'm learning that I'm not too good with traditional fried foods, but oddities and stuff on the side are a huge hits. I need to start improving the taste and complexity of my batters, and I need to get my dipping/dunking technique down better to improve the visual aesthetics of my fried delights.

That's it for this post, I hope you enjoyed! Many thanks to all those who offered their support (or just gawked) while I fried up the Twinkies. As always, please leave your comments below, as well as further suggestions as to what to fry next!

Thank you all!!

Sincerely,



~ Fryer Lawrence

Corndogs Ahoy!

This weekend marked the first attempt at deep-fried foodstuffs. After much deliberation as to what type of food to christen the Waring Pro with, I finally settled on corndogs, as they are one of my favorite things to eat and very likely the root of the birthday gift of a deep frying machine. Also, as I looked online for corndog recipes and they seemed fairly straightforward to make.

First things first however, I had to assemble the deep fryer. After reading the instruction manual cover-to-cover, I found this was actually quite simple. The whole thing just sorta clunks together, no real fancy steps required.
















Next I printed out my recipe, which can be found here.

Finding the ingredients was by far the longest part of the process, for two reasons: 1.) Most of the shopping in my life has thus been constrained to the cereal and frozen food isles, and 2.) once I finally found the right sections of the supermarket, frickin Ralphs was completely sold out of cornmeal. Those jerks!

After much detouring (and a second trip back to Ralphs for more vegetable oil), I was FINALLY set with all my ingredients.

Time for corndog makin' action!

First things first, I poured the oil and turned the fryer on, as it would take a short while for the oil to heat up to 375 degrees!


As the oil warmed, I mixed all the parts of the batter together into a thick gloopy mixture.

Next, the 'dogs themselves had to be floured (in order to help the batter to stick to them) and then jabbed onto popsicle sticks.

Next came the moment we had all been waiting for... the actual moment of deep frying... To guard myself against possible death and/or combustion, I safeguarded myself with a plethora of personal armor. Once properly attired, I commenced the dunking of the dogs into the batter and layed those bad-boys down in hot hot grease! To my surprise, I found that nothing really leapt or splattered. The oil bubbled slightly around the dogs, but nothing violent or turbulent like I had imagined (in my mind I thought I'd be like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, with waves of scalding oil bursting up in the air at my every command). The corndogs cooked quickly though. It only took about 2-3 minutes TOPS before they were golden brown and ready to be scooped out. For the most part the batter stayed even, however I haven't quite mastered keeping pieces of it from floating off into oblivion as they were first lowered into the fryer.













From here on out, it was pretty quick and painless. The corndogs fried quickly, and while flour, batter and grease sort of got everywhere, within a matter of minutes I had a plate full of brown home-fried awesomeness.

As an afterthought (and because I still had a TON of batter left over), I battered and threw in a banana too, just for kicks, before I shut the whole operation down for the day. I also poured in a gigantor blob of pure-batter, because my corndog webpage told me I could.

OVERALL OPINION

The corndogs were edible, yet slightly bland. Also, the choice of using gourmet bratwurst instead of normal hot-dogs felt sort of strange as I was eating them. My mind kept telling me it was a regular corn dog, but my taste buds kept reporting otherwise.

The deep fried bananas though... were f-ing AWESOME. Seriously.

POST-MORTUM

Overall I learned a few lessons:
1.) My safety gear was totally unnecessary. All my outfit did was made me look ridiculous. The only way I could have hurt myself and my surroundings is if I tipped the whole machine over on myself.
2.) Next time I need to make sweeter batter, possibly by adding far more sugar. The batter tasted bland next to store-bought corndogs, and when I ate the blob-o-batter I fried, it tasted almost exactly like cornbread (which to me has always seemed very tasteless)
3.) Don't fancy up corndogs. Just go hotdog style and not crazy high-end German sausage. The curvy-ness of sausages makes it funky to put popsicle sticks in them, and really, they aren't meant to be transformed into battered goodies. Regular hotdogs will be used the next go-round.
4.) Always, always, always deep-fry bannanas. They end up gooey and sweet and delicious. They'd be a perfect treat to go with ice cream. The bananas were really the saving grace of my evening.
5.) Oil takes about 25x as long to cool down as it does to heat up. And if you spill it all over your counter-top trying to put it back into its jug, it's a bitch to clean up.

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Overall I was very pleased with my maiden voyage. I had accomplished my main goals, which were to make something edible and not to melt my hands off.

I learned plenty, and no longer fear a deep-fried doom.

Thanks for tuning in, and as always, feel free to submit comments and suggestions as for what to fry next!!! I can't wait until my next posting!

This is Fryer Lawrence, signing off.