Fry Day, Fry Day, Fry Day, Part I

It’s fair season. The end of summer brings to mind rickety rides, 4H barns, quilting competitions, and deep-fried food. My fried food preferences trend fairly tame: elephant ears and funnel cakes are my summer staples. Every once in a while, I’ll succumb to the siren’s call of a churro. A deep-fried Oreo seems appealing, but my curiosity’s never been strong enough to actually buy one. This year, reports are out that the Iowa fair is selling deep-fried butter... on a stick.

Nothing says “the last days of summer” like deep-fried food.

It seemed appropriate for me to embrace this tradition. I had an extra vacation day last week that allowed me to putter around in the kitchen. Putter… putter is far too passive of a term. I came in armed with a game plan. And our Hamilton Beach fryer was on the front lines.

 

A quick aside – if you like fried food and you do not have a deep fryer, invest in one. Ours was an anniversary present that I gave to my better half. He is the guru of hot wings and it’s always delicious when he takes the time to make them. The downside to all of his culinary greatness was that pan-frying, even with splatter guards, got oil all over the kitchen. It was aggravating. There would be oil on the stove, a film of oil on the cabinet fronts and the microwave. Because of the heat and the ability to aerosolize, oil would end up on the tops of the cabinets and settling on other surfaces throughout our home. It was gross. GROSS! But the food was so delicious.

To save my sanity while encouraging John to continue cooking wings, I invested in a deep fryer. I did my homework, shopped around, read reviews, and settled on the fryer I purchased. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty awesome. The best part? I don’t have oil vapors floating all over my home. Added to that, the controllable temperature is far more accurate than eyeballing a frying pan. The higher temperatures also lock in more flavor and make the foods crisp, not greasy. And it’s so contained that I can have it on the counter under a cabinet (fully supervised) and there’s no oil on the underside of the cabinet at the end of the frying.

Did I mention that the fryer contains the oil so it doesn’t get all over everything?

 

So I love our fryer. And last week I decided that we’d have a “fry day” where I tried out a couple of different recipes from Allrecipes.com in one go. The menu for the day started with Deep-Fried Brie. My mouth waters even typing that. The brie was followed by revisiting the bacon ravioli in an attempt to make the recipe more edible. After that we had some Spicy New Orleans Catfish Fries and I finished off the day with Super Easy and Spicy Fried Pickles.

 

First order of business was prepping the brie. The recipe calls for a wedge, but why buy a wedge when you can buy a whole round at Costco for the same price?

The brie was cubed, the eggs beaten, and the bread crumbs prepared. I was ready to start my breading.

Important key to breading: use one hand for the wet ingredients and one hand for the dry ingredients. If you take an eggy hand and move it to the breading bowl, you’re going to bread your hand as much (if not more so) as the food you’re trying to cook. By keeping one hand dedicated to the left and one hand dedicated to the right, you have efficiency with little mess.

Now – it was time for the frying! The recipe calls to fry the brie for five minutes. The best I can figure is that the time is based on pan-frying. I put a batch into the fryer, set the timer for five minutes and wandered off. (Hot oil unattended, I know.) Four minutes later, I notice that there is a ridiculous amount of boiling going on in the fryer and I go over to take a look. The oil was foaming! (Yes, I should have gotten pictures of this. But I didn’t. You’re going to have to live.) I fished out the first batch of deep-fried brie.

Not too shabby, right? Looks pretty delicious if a little on the darker brown side? There was one downside with these – they were hollow. The brie had melted out into the oil and that’s what caused the fryer to boil with such ferocity. Whoops.

The next batch I was kinder to. I dunked them in and fried them (with a close eye on their progress) for somewhere between 2-3 minutes.

Success! Gooey, delicious, cheesy success! As you can see in the picture, the cheese was still leaking out, but the majority of the cheesy goodness had remained inside the breading with the shortened cooking time. We served them with a lingonberry jam that set the brie off perfectly. (Tiff and I both abhor canned cranberry sauce and cranberries aren’t in season yet so we couldn’t make our own.)

The biggest lesson taken from this (aside from watch what you’re frying) was that the breading adhered best where the brie still had its rind. If I could find mini, bite-sized brie wheels, I think we could potentially fry these little guys without drips of cheese escaping. I am now on a quest for tiny rounds of soft cheese with edible rinds.

But what about the rest of our culinary capers for the day? Stay tuned for Part II.