Masala Fried Shrimp This tasty shrimp is brightly flavored and nicely spiced, with an appealing heat that lingers. Crispy Corn Tortillas with Chicken and Cheddar For these flautas, tortillas are rolled around a savory filling and pan-fried until crisp.
Fried Plantains Crisp, salty fried plantain slices, or tostones, are a ubiquitous side dish at Latin American restaurants. And the job of the professional deep fat fryer is to make sure that the temperature remains constant. The same scientific principles apply to all food. This is how all deep frying happens. So why is Indian food different? When you immerse a French fry or a chicken nugget in hot oil, the food absorbs the oil to let the dual process of drying and steaming begin.
But in the case of Indian food, you never completely immerse the food in oil. A poori, for instance, is cooked on the surface. You put it into a dekchi or wok full of hot oil and you do not need to let it go all the way in. It simply floats on the surface. And as soon as the drying process begins on one side, you quickly turn it over and fry the other side.
The steaming process explains why a poori puffs up in the dekchi as the moisture turns into steam and evaporates. Consequently, it absorbs much less oil than any Western food that goes into a deep fat fryer. Exactly the same thing is true of a pakora or a kachori or a samosa. Because it is surface frying, the absorption of oil is much less than we think. But not all Indian food necessarily has less oil. Manjit gave me the example of the paratha.
Many cooks especially some of the famous street side parathawallas take a shallow pan and fill it with fat. When the paratha goes into the tawa, it stays there long enough to suck up the fat it is immersed in. So while the parathas that come out of these pans may taste delicious, it is possible that they actually have absorbed more fat upto per cent more than a poori. And yet we have been brought up to believe that a paratha is always healthier than a poori!
A paratha made at home in a tawa with very little oil is of course quite healthy. Manjit suggests a simple test. Take a roadside paratha and a home-made poori and squeeze them both.
See which one oozes out the most oil. It will always be the paratha and not the poori. Manjit says that, at an intuitive level, Indians usually shun oily, fried food. A good pakora is one that is light and firm.
If somebody serves us a soggy pakora or a bhajjiya that oozes oil, we regard it as a failure. If we are served a poori that has been over-browned in the dekchi because it has been fried for too long, we send it back. We only like food that has been quickly fried on the surface of a wok.
Nakul was as disbelieving as I was. But because he is of a numbers-oriented nature, Nakul had the fat-content tested. In nearly every case, he found, Indian deep-fried foods had much less oil than Western fried foods. And in many cases, the Indian deep-fried dishes contained less fat than the dishes we regard as shallow-fried and therefore, healthy. What this means is that there are no hard and fast rules. By using this form you agree with the storage and handling of your data by this website.
The Steamy Truth Most fried food is full of moisture. How can we stop that? Copy The Experts Think about your favorite fried chicken outlet. All three of these methods of packaging combine two important things: ventilation and absorption. Absorbing The Issue Laying down some paper towels or even a bit of cloth in your travel container will go a long way towards keeping your food fresh. A Toasty Container If you want to keep fried food fresh at home, you might consider throwing it on a rack in a warm oven.
Author Peter Allen Peter's path through the culinary world has taken a number of unexpected turns. This is important for several reasons, the first being safety. If your oil is getting too hot, your food can burn, and if it gets really hot it could ignite.
On the other end of the spectrum, cool oil can result in limp, soggy, greasy food. Overcrowding the pot is a common mistake home cooks make when deep-frying. Adding too many items at one time will immediately lower the oil temperature, which as just discussed, is not a good thing.
Overcrowding also causes the oil level to rise, which can lead to overflowing and spillage. To avoid both of these problems, plan on cooking in small batches. Keep a sheet pan lined with paper next to the stove for draining and holding the cooked items. Be sure to strain out any crumbs or food particles, as they can burn, affecting the flavor and degrading your oil.
For most home cooks, it's reasonable to expect to be able to cook with any given pot of oil about three times. Beyond that, the forces of heat and oxidation take their toll, and the oil's smoke point falls significantly, meaning it will start to smoke at a much lower temperature than when it was fresh.
This is just an unfortunate reality of deep-frying at home. Restaurants can squeeze much more life out of their frying oil because they use it continuously, as opposed to using it then storing it for a whole and then using it again, as home cooks are likely to do.
For more on how that works, read how restaurants get their fries so crispy. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data.
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