Thursday, January 14, 2010

Does the Deep Fryer = perfection?

Last night I was at a friends house and I had a discussion about deep fried food basically being awesome, unmatched in taste. My friend (of the male persuasion of course) made a comment like, "the deep fryer equals perfection", or, "everything is made perfect when it is deep fried." Now, I would agree that deep fried food is awesome and the taste is usually great... but perfection? That would mean that the deep frying method is always better than other methods.


As I was going to sleep last night I decided to run a little experiment, a competition if you will between deep frying and pan frying. For this first experiment I chose to make french toast. I have never prepared french toast before but it is super easy, I found a recipe from cooks.com here: http://www.cooks.com/rec/doc/0,195,135187-243192,00.html. I made the coating and coated 2 slices of bread; one for the pan and one for the deep fryer. Because bread floats in the deep fryer it is necessary to flip it over part way through (just like the pan fried one) so both sides are submerged in the oil.



The results were not surprising. The pan fried french toast came out delicious and great where as the deep fried french toast came out nice and crispy. I had no issues with the pan fried french toast which turn out the way french toast should. But the deep fried french toast was less appetizing because the inside was still soft and therefore retained a lot of oil. I still ate it... I guess that's why I try to go to the gym regularly. So the winner here is definitely the pan fried french toast, sorry Matt.

Next I tried a variation on the french toast idea just because I love to experiment in the kitchen. I had a small jar of raspberry jelly that I was not using in the fridge and decided to spread some on before coating the bread. I carefully spread the jelly on both sides of the bread and again put a slice in the pan and in the deep fryer.

The results this time were a bit more surprising. I figured that the pan fried french toast would again turn out better but it turned out to be quite soggy and not much like french toast at all. They both tasted like they had the jelly on it but the deep fried french toast came out much like it had in the first test; nice and crunchy (but oily too of course). In this case I much preferred the deep fried version; so in this case the winner is the deep fryer.



To be fair to my beloved deep fryer the odds were stacked against it. 1. it is an old deep fryer. 2. The oil was not fresh and clean. 3. The recipe used in this experiment was meant for pan fried french toast.

If anyone has any other suggestions for kitchen experiments I would love to try them out. Please let me know, Thanks.

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