it's my party and i'll fry if i want to...

Okay, okay, so my birthday was last week, but I still had a delicious piece of cake that my roommate Ashley baked me for my birthday. So test 5! Deep fried birthday cake! I took the piece of cake (pineapple/banana/cinnamon cake she told me), battered it in a light tempura style coating and deep fried it for a minute or so. Delicious!
I have written out a recipe for the batter this time, to make it easier to write down. this recipe can also be used for deep fried ice cream and fruit fritters.
batter
1 cup of flour
1 tsp of baking powder/soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1 cup of ice water
1 tsp vanilla extract
sift the dry ingredients together in a bowl, then mix together the wet ingredients in other bowl lightly. the water must be ice cold to insure a light batter. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and mix lightly. do not over mix.
add the slice of cake and coat thoroughly. slowly lower the cake into the deep fryer. After about 30 seconds, the cake started to float and the top wasn't crisping, so I put another fryer basket on top to keep it submersed in oil. Now, the oil in the fryer should be as clean as possible, as any food fried previously will lightly incorporate that flavor into the batter, in my case, it had a slight taste of chicken wings, but was still delicious. When cake is nice and golden brown, remove with tongs and garnish with icing sugar, chocolate sauce, etc.

The batter was light and crispy, slightly sweet with nice crunch. Will definitely make again. Give it a 8 fries out of ten!

my friend Jillian helps me out of a pickle.

Test four! Today my lovely assistant Jillian helped me with this post, deep fried pickles! Our "establishment" serves these tasty things as an appetizer and they are fairly popular among pickle connoisseurs. No silly pickle haters allowed! First, as always, grabbing the ingredients. You will needs some delicious giant dill pickles, some eggs, milk, some flour, some breadcrumbs (panko again in this case), and some cajun spice. Crack open the eggs and mix with some milk, beat lightly until just combined. then add a boatload of
cajun to the breadcrumbs, you want a 60% breadcrumbs to %40 percent cajun mixture. Place flour in a separate bowl. Cut the pickles into 4 segments each, length wise, an place on paper towel to let it soak up some of the moisture, the less moisture the better. We used to freeze our pickles after we made them, but found that the moisture create in the ice made the batter fall off when we fried them. let them soak into the paper towel for at least 15 minutes.
Then, as Jillian demonstrates in the below pictures, dip into the egg mixture, then the flour, back
into the egg and then into the the resulting should be a nice thick layer of a breadcrumb batter. Place the pickles in the deep fryer for approximately 45 seconds or until the breadcrumbs brown. Let cool and serve with sour cream! I give this recipe 8 fries out of ten, but only if you are a pickle lover, as they are very dilly.I seemed to have lost the picture of the finished product, but will post later. Enjoy!
p.s. Thanks Jillian!

i battered your taters until your balls were crunchy

So test three! This one turned out extremely well and was friggin delicious. As a sports pub, our restaurant has a limited amount of things readily available that aren't chicken wings, so I gotta improvise. I'm always looking for things to make with potatoes, because let's face it, they are friggin awesome. I especially love loaded baked potatoes, twice baked potatoes or potato croquettes, and I wanted to try and recreate that taste in this test. So first I took some mashed potatoes out of a bag, although any left over mashed potatoes will work at all., but try to keep the potatoes as cold as possible. I then collected the ultimate baked potato ingredients; a handful of green onions, some sour cream, shredded cheddar and bacon bits, (the bacon can be omitted for veggie folk, but it adds loads of taste), a sprinkle of cajun and I also added a few shots of ranch for flavor. Grabbed all those guys and mixed them together, then placed them in the freezer for approx 20 minutes to stiffen up as the sour cream made them a little runny. I then took a bowl of breadcrumbs mixed with cajun spice (we have a lot lying around), and beat 2 eggs in a separate bowl. To make the balls, i took a golf ball sized amount and rolled it between my palms to make a smooth ball, i then dipped that into the beaten egg mixture, then rolled it into the breadcrumbs. The breadcrumbs stuck well but the potato was still a little runny. It doesn't really matter that much at this point though because the fryer will create a nice crunchy coating with the breadcrumbs.

So I placed the balls in the fryer until the breadcrumbs were a nice brown. The result should be a nice crispy coating on the outside, and steaming hot baked potato flavored goodness on the inside. When i cut it open and tasted it, it tasted exactly like a fully laded baked potato should, creamy, crunchy and delicious. I will definitely recreate for side dishes for meals. I give it an 8 out of ten (enthusiastic!) fries.

blooming idiot

so for this fry test i tried to recreate the "blooming onion". i first had one of these when i lived in Ottawa, but they are apparently fairly common in the states at places like chilli's and the outback steakhouse. it basically is a large white onion, cut into segments and battered which blooms out like a flower when fried. i didn't exactly go according to plan. immediately after it came out, i figured out a way easier way to do it. sigh.
so i started with a large white onion, cut about an inch off the top and bottom and removed the skin. took a sharp knife and cut across approximately 3/4 of the way down, then again in the other direction, over and over until i had approximately 16 sections to work with. i then reached in and pulled out most of the core pieces. i placed the onion in an ice bath to help spread the petals for what was supposed to be an hour, but ended up getting distracted with having to cook food (oh, yeah, my job) and it ended up being closer to 2 hours. i think this contributed to some of the problem with the onion, as when i finally took the onion out, the last row of petals had fallen off. whoops. i dried the onion and mixed the flour. i had about a cup of flour, some cayenne, Cajun, oregano, thyme, salt and pepper and a little cumin. mixed it all together and floured the onion. i then mixed a cup of milk with an egg. dipped the flour in the milk mixture, then the flour, and repeated the process. i should have let the onion sit for at least 15 minutes in the fridge to let the batter cool, but i didn't, as i got impatient. this probably didn't help.

i then dropped the onion in the fryer from which i had removed the fryer baskets. i let it cook for approximately 5 minutes, then removed. the batter didn't really stick to the petals much, and as soon as i took it out i realised i should have just made a simple batter with all the ingredients, then dipped the whole product in that. the batter was good in itself, well seasoned, it just wasn't thick enough to give the whole thing a battery goodness i was looking for. i made a quick dill dip of mayonnaise/sour cream/dill and garlic powder to dip the petals in. that was unfortunately the best part.
all in all, it was good, but not restaurant good. i will attempt again with a different batter next time, and post the results. i give it 4 fries out of ten.

i'm feeling so blue, i think i'm gonna fry

Well its my first fry test and until i get the hang of layout, and get a hold of a proper digital camera, theses posts will be a little sloppy. Here goes:
Looking around my kitchen at work, trying to decide what to fry, i come about our cheese stack in the walk-in fridge. a delicious chunk of blue cheese. Now I've had mozza sticks and cheddar sticks before, but none of the crumblier cheeses seem to get deep fried as much. As a blue cheese lover, i figured why not? after a few comments from my coworker chuck of "that's gonna make a huge mess", i collected all the deep frying ingredients. we had just finished making deep fried haddock for fish and chips (next time maybe?) and still had some batter left over from that. the batter consisted of flour, beer, a half a can of soda water some baking soda, a little Cajun, some pepper, all mixed to the nice battery consistency. we don't really measure it, as my friend hawk says, measuring kills kittens. then i grabbed some flour in a bowl and cut a chunk of the blue cheese about the size of two dice stacked on top of each other, carefully, because it crumbles easily.
i took the chunk, dipped it into the flour, then the batter. the batter didn't seem to want to hold on very well to the blue cheese, so i decided to add an extra step and dip it into some panko breadcrumbs mixed with Cajun spice to make sure i had a good coating around the blue cheese as i didn't want it melting and creating a huge mess in the fryer.

it was a little sloppy and a little rushed, but it seemed to hold up. i put it in the fryer and fried it for approx 45 seconds until the breadcrumbs started to brown (our fryers are set at 375f).
it came out a nice solid crunchy square. i ate it, as i promise to eat everything i fry, and was quite surprised, it was pretty good. crunchy on the outside, soft gooey bluecheesyness on the inside, and for a brief second it's what i imagined french people eating in sports bars. all in all, as a first attempt to deep fry a crumbly cheese, it wasn't great but it wasn't terrible. i give it 5 fries out of ten.

to all my oil subjects

welcome to my fry blog! this blog is dedicated to all the people out there who, like me, have ever wondered after eating, "i wonder what this would taste like deep fried?". Each week, maybe sometimes twice a week, i will deep fry something new. sometimes things you would like to recreate, sometimes not. i've been doing this for weeks already, so i figure why not blog it? so stick around, it's sure to get messy in this kitchen.