The New Hotness has Arrived

Finally, I can live like a civilized human being and a bona fide Southerner. I just came home from Ace with a 4-gallon Bayou Classic deep fryer.

A hardware store had a 4-gallon propane fryer? Of course it did. This is the South. They had a whole bunch of Blackstone griddles, too, as well as the full line of Big Green Eggs.

The guys at Ace were telling he how great it was as they put it in the car. One of them said his dad had the same fryer. Of course he does. This is the South.

Frying has always been the weak spot in my culinary skills. It’s very hard to do well, it makes a huge mess, and it leaves you with a lot of fat to either throw out or store with difficulty.

When you fry in a flat-bottomed vessel, as most people do, crumbs fall off the food, hit the bottom, and burn. The bottom is the hottest part of the vessel, so anything that lands there turns black. These crumbs can ruin your food by making the oil taste burnt. If your food comes out okay, and you don’t want to lose the oil, you have to pour it through a filter to get the crumbs out before you store it.

A big gas fryer has heating tubes above the bottom of the vessel. That means crumbs can fall down under the tubes where the oil is at about 120°. Too cool to burn. They sit there doing no harm until you change the oil, which should last 20 sessions. The fryer I got has a V-shaped bottom so the crumbs are concentrated for easy removal via a drain tube.

Removing oil from a fryer and storing it between uses are horrible experiences. You have to have a jug or something set aside, and you have to lift a big pot and pour it in with a shaky funnel. You’ll get oil on yourself and the jug. Expect it. You’ll have to clean everything off before you quit. And you can’t store the oil until it cools down unless you pour it into a metal container. You have to sit and wait for the oil to cool.

With a dedicated deep fryer, you seal the machine up against bugs and let the oil wait for you, right where it is.

Frying indoors makes oil droplets condense on your walls, stove hood, and whatever else is near the fryer.

When I fry stuff, it’s hard for me to get even cooking. For example, chicken tends to end up darker where it touches the bottom of the fryer, and that’s no good. Shallow frying is really just a poor imitation of deep frying, which is the proper way to do it. Deep fryers cook things evenly.

Another issue: you need a lot of fat unless you’re frying tiny things. Making fried chicken in a small pot or pan takes a long time, because if you put enough food for a family in the oil, it cools down immediately, and the breading falls off. The breading that stays on the meat soaks up oil. It’s a bad situation. A big deep fryer is better because the fat has a lot of thermal mass to resist cooling, and if you have a propane fryer, you have many times the heating power any stove provides. The fryer I bought has a 90,000-BTU burner, and that’s around 26,000 watts according to the web. No 110-volt fryer can give you more than about 1750 watts. A nice electric stove tops out at around 26,000 BTU, so a propane fryer produces about 3.4 times as much frying power.

I’m sure a better cook could do better with frying than I do, but he would still have to make tiny batches and do a lot of annoying work. And he could forget about making chicken and hush puppies at the same time.

I bought a T-Fal countertop fryer a few years back. The folks at America’s Test Kitchen said it was great. It was a fun experiment, but it didn’t work out. If the fryer were really as good as ATK and T-Fal claimed, I would still be using it, but it has sat idle for at least two years. That proves it’s not very good.

The food gets darker near the heating element. It fries miniscule portions because it lacks the power to stay hot when you add a decent amount of food. Cleaning it is a real chore, regardless of what deluded reviewers say. You have to put several big parts in the dishwasher. And it clutters the kitchen.

I believed the ad copy when it said the T-Fal would cook 2.65 pounds of food in one batch, but I found it to be untrue in real life. I would say one pound is about the limit. Maybe it depends on the type of food.

With propane and 4 gallons of oil, I should be able to feed a table full of people quickly without a lot of effort.

Peanut oil just happens to be on sale at Publix right now, so that’s good. I just read that peanut oil does not absorb flavors from food, so I suppose it’s the best choice for a fryer that will have to cook different things.

By the way, I saw an ATK video where they fried chicken, and they messed it up. They presented it as though they had done a great job, but the chicken was overly browned in places. If ATK can’t do it, it’s hard.

I tried coming up with a fried chicken recipe in ’21, and it never made me really happy. Tonight I decided to do the obvious thing. I dug through my files and found a 2005 recipe which, at the time, seemed much, much better than Popeyes. I’m going to give it another shot.

I am hoping to fry some chicken tomorrow. Maybe some hush puppies. It’s not an experiment. I know it will work, because I’m doing it with the right equipment. Every stovetop frying setup is a desperate compromise and an imitation. A deep fryer is the real thing.