Rome wasn’t Built in a Day

My first effort at deep frying in a propane cooker is behind me.

My wife likes wings, so we had them on hand. I also bought legs and thighs. I decided to make hush puppies as well, simply because I could.

First off, the Bayou Classic fryer works perfectly. It’s easy to use. It heats fairly quickly. It holds a temperature when you dump two pounds of chicken into it. The built-in thermometer is pretty accurate when checked against a candy thermometer.

This fryer has a weird pipe that goes through the oil, and burning propane goes through the pipe. There is a sort of chimney in the back, and the burned gases go out. They exit at around waist height and go straight up.

Believe it or not, the hot gases are not a problem. I would not want to hold my face over the chimney, but you can wave your hand over it while the flames are at peak ferocity without getting burned. The pipe must do a great job of transmitting heat to the oil.

I thought I would have to move the fryer a long way from the wall of my house, but I would say 18″ would be more than enough.

The instructions say to keep the fryer far from your house. Well, of course they do. This fryer does not have a thermostat, and if you walk away and leave it running, which could happen if you drink while you barbecue, the oil can get so hot it bursts into flame, and then your house burns down.

I am not going to keep the fryer away from the house. It’s too heavy to move when it’s full. Also, what if my guests bring their kids? Kids do a lot of dumb things around pools, and running into a hot fryer at top speed is exactly the kind of thing you would expect one to do. If the fryer is close to the house where adults can guard it, kids are less likely to spill hot oil all over themselves or put their hands on the fryer because you told them not to.

When only adults are present, there is no reason to think the fryer will flame up or fall over. You have to make sure you don’t fry if you have guests with common sense issues, but that’s something you can control.

Does it hold its temperature? Yes. Almost too well.

Fried chicken recipes commonly say to fry at 350°, but if you do that, you’re probably going to get chicken that’s too brown on the outside. Chicken should be fried at 300-330°. Recipes say to fry at 350° because the people who write recipes expect you to use inferior equipment that has neither the mass nor the power to hold a temperature when food is added. They figure you’ll drop your food in at 350° and the oil will immediately go down to the correct temperature.

When I put my chicken in the fryer, the temperature didn’t budge. I had to keep turning the heat down. I even turned it off for a while. My take: a high flame is for heating the oil, but you need a very low flame for cooking.

Is it hard to control the temperature? Yes, if, like me, you overshoot it in the first place. I expected the temperature to drop, and it didn’t. It took a very long time to get it to go down. You need to make sure you’re at the right temperature when the food goes in, because you can increase it later, but you won’t be able to reduce it fast enough to compensate for overheating your oil.

The baskets work fine, but it’s easy to hang them incorrectly when you take them out of the oil to drain, and if you do, they will swing down suddenly until the handles hit the front edge of the fryer. This is pretty scary, as if standing in front of 4 gallons of bubbling oil weren’t scary already.

So what happened with the food?

The chicken was pretty bad.

I used a recipe I wrote in 2005, and the recipe says it was better than Popeyes. I’m sure that was true when I used a pan to fry the chicken, but it was not true today.

I salted the chicken, applied a lot of Frank’s Red Hot, and let it sit for a while. Then I added orange juice to add acidity, and I let it sit some more. I breaded the chicken with a mixture of starch, flour, and some seasoninges. Then I dipped it in a seasoned egg and buttermilk wash, plus more Frank’s, and breaded it again.

The chicken’s skin turned dark brown. Not the breading, although that was dark, too. The skin itself. Darker than the breading. I think the sugar in the orange juice caramelized. It never did that when I used it for pan-frying. I’ll have to give it up.

The chicken had chipotle powder in the breading, plus the Frank’s I applied earlier. I also added pepper. I couldn’t taste any heat at all. I guess I need to revisit the recipe.

The chicken stuck to the fryer baskets. I have seen people lower full baskets into oil on the web, but it looks like it won’t work for me. I’ll have to lower each piece into the baskets, one at a time.

The chicken was too well-done on the outside, as I mentioned. I think this was partly because of the oil temperature, but also, the pieces were too big. Frying big things is a mistake. I was not able to find small chicken pieces at the store, and I didn’t want to cut up a small chicken because I’m not good at it.

The wings may have been better, but I didn’t try them.

The pieces cooked at different speeds, so in the future, I will know to put small pieces in one basket and big pieces in the other.

The hush puppies fried up perfectly. They even turned themselves. When I dropped them in, they blew up with CO2 and floated. As they cooked, the sides in the oil became dryer and lighter, so the hush puppies rotated so the heavy raw sides were down. That was neat.

Unfortunately, the recipe was no good.

I got it from Southern Living. I figured they would have a clue. The recipe said to use equal parts corn meal and flour. I thought that was a bad idea, but I gave it a try. The hush puppies were big flour balls. They were half biscuit and half cornbread. They lacked flavor. The recipe didn’t contain enough onions, either. It lacked salt, and the hush puppies weren’t sweet enough or dark enough.

I’m going with my instincts next time. I’ll go 3:1, meal to flour. I’ll use more onions. I’ll add sugar so the hush puppies are sweet and they brown better. I’ll double the salt.

The hush puppies weren’t bad. I ate a bunch. But they weren’t what they were supposed to be.

I’ll jot down my plans.

INGREDIENTS

3/4 cup cornmeal mix (self-rising)
1/4 cup self-rising flour
1 tsp. salt
1 large egg
1/2 cup buttermilk
1-1/4 cups finely-chopped onion
1/2 tbsp. sugar

That will be better. If I don’t have self-rising flour, I’ll add half a teaspoon of baking powder.

This machine will be a huge improvement to our arsenal. I look forward to firing it up again and applying the things I learned today.