In general, I think that deep-frying food at home is a really bad idea. For me. Your
situation may indeed be different, but I reckon that my situation is pretty darn common.
To explain why I think deep frying should be left to the pros, I'm actually gonna give
you a french fry recipe; the one time of year when I do deep fry here in my own kitchen.
Oh hey, I want to thank ExpressVPN for sponsoring this video. If you're looking to use the internet
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Alright, here's the one time of year when I do deep fry here in my kitchen at home.
For the last three years, I’ve planted potatoes in the backyard. My older son’s favorite
food is French fries, and I just wanted to show him where they come from. So, every summer,
we all go out back with the pitchfork. Digging up potatoes is like a treasure hunt. It’s
great to do with kids.
"Whoa, another one!"
"That's a lot. Here, take that one. Pull it off."
"OK, I'll get that potato."
"Nay-noh!"
"Go help mommy."
"Oh my — yeah, reach in and — here, put it in here. Put the potato in there."
OK, now let’s turn these into fries. First dilemma: What do you fry in? My biggest pot
is my 7-and-a-half quart dutch oven. Unless you really want to buy a tabletop deep fryer,
I figure something like this is probably gonna be your best option. It’s really heavy,
which helps to maintain a consistent temperature of the oil. But even in this huge pot, the
most oil I can safely fry in is two or three quarts. You have to leave space for the displacement
of the food, and enough headroom at the top for things to be able to slosh around without
spilling over the sides.
Compare that to the deep fryer at my friend Saralyn’s restaurant here in Macon — Grow.
She mostly serves healthy stuff here, so as commercial deep fryers go, her’s is really
small, and yet it still holds 20 gallons. That’s 53 of these.
One reason you want to fry in a lot of oil is that it allows delicate ingredients to
float around in their own personal space without getting bumped into other objects before they
are strong enough to take it, i.e. when they are crispy and rigid. If you wanted to fry
dainty, long, thin fries, you gotta fry them in tiny little batches, otherwise you’d
bash them apart while you stirred them around, or they’d stick to the bottom of the pan,
or they’d stick to each other.
So, when I fry fries at home, I use relatively small potatoes, like these ones from the garden,
and I cut them up into wedges. The wedge is a very structurally sound shape. Look at that
beautiful purple breed. I love those.
You always want to cut fries way bigger than you want them, because they do shrink a lot
when cooked.
Then you gotta get your oil up to temperature. There's lots of ways of making fries, but
the basic, time-tested method is to fry them twice, first at a low temperature, like 275ºF,
but you gotta overshoot the mark when you're heading it up, because look what happens when
you put this much cold mass into such a small volume of hot oil. The temperature plummets.
When you fry in a ton of oil, like you can in a restaurant, the oil temperature is gonna
be way more stable.
At home, you gotta mother the temperature like crazy, and that’s especially tough
on an electric range, which takes a long time to heat up and cool down.
I’ve gotta move those to keep them from sticking, and if they were dainty little fries,
they’d be breaking apart right now.
Hey, let’s think for a second about how insanely dangerous this bubbling caldron of
death is. I only let Freddie look at it for a minute, with me hovering right over him.
Not only does oil get far hotter than water can, it is sticky, so if it splashes or spills
on you, it’s gonna do incredible damage.
This stage, called "blanching," I did for about 10 minutes. Fries take a long time.
Now, you might be thinking, “Man, couldn’t you have solve all your problems here by just
frying in way smaller batches?”
Well yeah, but fries are only good if you eat them right away. What’s the point of
perfectly frying a tiny batch of fries if they're just gonna get soggy while they sit
there and you fry the rest?
What the cookbooks generally tell you to do now is take all the fries out and drain them
on a rack, which is a really messy and time-consuming proposition. Then you crank the oil temperature
up about a hundred degrees hotter, and then put the fries back in in batches to crisp
them up. I think that makes a lot of sense if you’re blanching several batches and
then frying several batches, but again, that’s a messy, time-consuming pain, and it results
in a whole bunch of tiny batches of fries that are not all done at the same time when
you want to eat them. So I just do one big batch, and then when you do that, you really
can just leave them in there while you crank up the heat around them. I’m looking for
375ºF. Again, it’s really hard to hold any temperature in there consistently.
This here is a good draining method. Towel goes in a big bowl. Lift the fries out with
the spider and the towel will absorb the excess oil. Whip the towel out, put in a bunch of
salt, and then toss everything in the bowl. And, you know, those are pretty good.
But now, what do we have? We have a big plate of fries. We have nothing to eat them with,
because imagine trying to grill some burgers while you’re cooking those fries? I mean,
I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it’s hard. I don’t want to do it. Imagine trying
to make fish and chips at home. You’ve fried the fries, now you gotta fry the fish, and
that’s gonna take another 15 minutes. Whichever thing you fry first is gonna be soggy by the
time you sit down to eat. It’s not like a restaurant deep fryer, which is big enough
to prepare an actual entire meal to order — hot, crispy, done all at the same time.
We don’t have that, so we have one big plate of fries and nothing else.
We also have a giant pot of hot oil, sitting on the stove, making the whole house smell
like a county fair. Really, the smell is gross, and it lingers for days. And you gotta let
the oil cool for hours before you can dispose of it, and how do you do that? You can’t
just pour it down the sink, because it'll clog your pipes. It clings to the sides.
In my fried chicken video, I talked about burying my fry oil in my garden. I should
have emphasized that only works for very small quantities. Too much oil will make it impossible
for your soil to grow anything.
So what do you do with half a gallon? You gotta pour it back into the bottle whence
it came, which is gonna require a funnel, and in the end, I still end up spilling a
bunch. Stay out of the shot, Ragusea, stay out of the shot! Sigh, messy business.
Then, what do you do with the bottle of used oil? Well, you could keep it, and fry with
it again. Fry oil does arguably get better with multiple uses. But if you're gonna go
that, then you really wanna strain it, right? And unless you fry really often, it’s gonna
get yucky hanging around the kitchen, and I'm sorry, I just throw it out.
Back over at Saralyn’s place, they use the same fry oil for days and days and days before
they change it, and think of all the portions of food that they get out of that. It's so
much less wasteful. Also, a company actually pays the restaurant to come pick up the old
grease and recycle it into biodiesel.
I want to emphasize again that my house smelled for days after I made those fries. I smelled
like a carney.
I get that fried food is delicious. I get that it can be really fun to make. I make
it sometimes, but really, mostly just for fun, for the novelty. In general, I think
it should be left to the pros. And, you know, I think that’s just fine. Pan-fried chicken
is a totally different animal from deep-fried chicken, and I really prefer it. The flavor
is less oily and the crust adheres better. It doesn’t crack off in big brittle shards.
I have a recipe for oven fries that’s easy to make at home, and is far better than any
plate of "real" fries I’ve ever produced in my kitchen. I will link to that recipe
video in the description once I’ve uploaded it.
This is gonna get a little high-concept now, but I do think that in my rapidly advancing
age, I have figured out one secret to success and happiness, and that is to stop fighting
the fundamental nature of things — of everything, but especially of yourself. Don’t try to
be something you’re not. I mean, unless you’re a sociopath, in which case, please,
fight it.
This goes for cooking, too. My advice to you is, don’t just think about what you want
to eat or what you want to cook. Think about what you and your kitchen are particularly
well-suited to cook. And for most of us, I'm sorry, I just don't think that that's gonna
be deep-fried food very often. There are, I think, actually, many things that are better
made in a home kitchen than they are in a restaurant. Unless you’re eating out at
a really good place, I think that you are far more likely to find a good plate of risotto
in your own kitchen than you are in a restaurant. Ooo, that gives me an idea for another video.
Gotta put that on the list.
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