RECENTLY, I acquired an electric deep fryer. It worked a little better than a pot of oil on the stove, but it didn’t make deep-frying any less of a messy, smelly affair.
A Good Appetite
Everybody Outside With the Deep Fryer
By MELISSA CLARK
Published: June 24, 2011
Recipes
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Batter-Fried Candy Bar Bites (June 29, 2011)
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Crunchy Soft-Shell Crabs (June 29, 2011)
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Mini Corn Dogs (June 29, 2011)
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Fried Zucchini Rounds (June 29, 2011)
Then my husband had the brilliant idea of using the fryer outside on the deck. We could enjoy a bounty of delicious fried foods without the olfactory reminders of ambient oil and unctuous fumes lingering around the next morning.
We invited friends over for a backyard deep-frying shindig, which allowed me to experiment with a variety of batters and coatings.
The breakdown went like this: A thin flour-based batter, spiked with baking powder and seltzer for lightness, was ideal for frying delicate ingredients like blackfish fillets and leaves of sage. It insulates them from overcooking and lends a nicely crisp but fairly neutral bite. It also worked wonders on deep-fried candy bars, keeping their molten fillings from leaking into the oil.
I got the crunchiest results from the classic flour/egg/bread crumb method. You dip the food in flour, then in egg (which sticks to the flour), then in bread crumbs. If you do this once with, say, zucchini slices, you get a deeply craggy, golden shell surrounding a tender vegetable chip. Dip it twice and it’s twice as good.
The quickest fry coating was a simple toss in a roughly half-and-half blend of cornmeal and flour, seasoned aggressively with salt and pepper. A brief soak in buttermilk helped the coating adhere more evenly, although damp ingredients like soft-shell crab, green tomatoes and oysters didn’t strictly need it. The results? Fried morsels with a crisp, mildly cornlike coating.
Lastly, in the spirit of summer fairs all over the country, I made a lightly sweetened cornmeal batter, then dunked hot dog chunks into it and deep-fried them into bronzed nuggets — in other words, bite-size corn dogs. (Feel free to fry whole hot dogs on sticks if you’re going for authenticity.)
Each time a batch went into the fryer, I watched everything carefully and turned the tidbits from time to time to make sure they were browning evenly (wooden chopsticks work well for this).
At the end of the night, my kitchen was clean, my guests were happily fed and my petunias had taken on a glossy sheen.