Now I know most of you avoid deep fried foods because they’re unhealthy, greasy and just plain bad for you, but not me! No, I skip fried foods because I’m scared stiff of boiling oil. Or at least…I was. And then one day I bought a deep fat thermometer, AKA candy thermometer – different from a meat thermometer because it goes up to 400 degrees, I don’t want to eat a chicken that’s seen that kind of heat!
It turns out that although liquid fat is, well, a liquid, frying with liquid fat is a dry cooking method. When foods are cooked in boiling oil the heat of the oil begins heating up the water in the food, turning it into steam and forcing it out of the food. That’s why there are so many bubbles when you fry food in oil.
The trouble with fat is if it’s not hot enough, your food will just sit in the not-quite-hot-enough fat for a while waiting for all that bubbling to begin. So you shouldn’t put the food into the fat until it reaches a high enough temperature to begin cooking the food as soon as it hits the fat. That’s where the thermometer comes into play. After some experience, you should be able to tell if it’s hot enough by watching it, but a deep fat thermometer is essential for deep-frying novices.
Once the food is in the sputtering, popping fat it will bubble like crazy until almost all the water is gone. It works like two people pressing their hands together and leaning into each other. So long as both people push, neither will fall. If one lets go, the other one ends up with a bloody nose. Once the water stops pushing back on the fat, the fat starts seeping into the food – making it really greasy, really fatty, and really bad for you. If you pull the food as the bubbling begins to subside, you should get crispy fried food, not soggy, greasy fried food.
Like all cooking methods, it takes some practice – and I’m still practicing myself – but knowing a little more about oil (other than it’s greasy!) has given me the cautious confidence to use it as a cooking method from time to time.
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