Frybruary officially kicks off next week, starting with my recipe for deep-fried chicken! Before we get into the recipes, though, we need to talk about the art and science of frying. This week’s video covers the basics with cute animations. If you want to know everything in the universe there is to know about frying, keep reading.
What is frying?
Frying is a dry cooking method that uses hot oil as the medium through which heat is transferred into food. As the food absorbs the heat, water molecules within the food item enter an excited state. That water becomes steam, which pushes its way out of the food and escapes through the oil as bubbles. The key to frying well is to maintain a pressure gradient where steam pushes out faster than oil can be absorbed so the food doesn’t become greasy.
Why haven’t you covered frying earlier?
I don’t fry by time and temperature. I watch my food as it cooks for signs that I need to adjust the temperature. This makes it a difficult skill to teach because it’s based on intuition and years of experience in a kitchen.
For people who already know how to cook, frying isn’t difficult to teach this way. However, many people start learning to cook after receiving a doctor’s recommendation to eat a gluten-free diet, whether due to celiac or another condition. I try to structure my content not only for people who follow a gluten-free diet, but also for people who have absolutely no culinary skills.
I also create each piece of content as if it will be any new contact’s very first exposure to the information I’m producing. That’s why in every video that calls for an onion, I demonstrate how to cut an onion every single time.
If frying is so hard to teach, why are you doing it now?
I’ve wanted to cover frying on the blog for a while, I just couldn’t figure out how to cover all the content in a single video, and couldn’t see the practicality in doing it on every video that covered frying.
I figured if I covered the basics in an introductory post and video, I could link back to the teaching information for each recipe I published during a month-long frying event. Thus, Frybruary was born.
Isn’t frying bad for you?
If you eat fried foods all the time, yes. If you fry up a batch of chicken on a Sunday after church once a month, not really. I think we should be able to enjoy all good things in moderation.
Technically, you do want to consider which fats you use for frying. I like canola oil. You could also use peanut or soybean oil if allergies aren’t an issue. Generic vegetable oil is also an option, but I don’t like non-specific labels. One vegetable oil I looked at was just soybean oil, and I wondered why they didn’t just label it as such.
Does that mean frying is healthy?
Probably not. Although oil won’t get into the food with proper temperature control, it will typically sit on the surface of the food because you pull the food directly out of the oil. It’s just physics. Despite that most surface oil will drain off on a rack before consumption, some will always remain. Then consider that most fried foods have a coating or are made almost entirely from starches (potatoes, doughnuts, fried mac & cheese balls, etc.), and you’ll realize why I say that frying should be enjoyed in moderation.
Basically, this month is probably all the frying I’ll do all year, except I might make some more fried chicken around September because fried chicken is delicious, and that’s about as long as I’ll be able to hold out.
So tomorrow is February 1st, and the official first day of Frybruary! Please send me any questions you have about frying, and I’ll try to answer them publicly either on social media or in a blog post.
Please leave your thoughts in a comment below, or get in touch with me directly by filling out the form on the contact page.
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