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.