I'm Just Here for the Food_ Version 2.0 - Alton Brown [42]
Sautéing: in sautéing, there is barely enough oil to cover the bottom of a wide, shallow, heavy and hot pan. The target foods are ideally small and uniformly cut. (A sauté is often erroneously called a stir-fry, which is actually performed at even higher temperatures and is not included here because most of us can’t consistently produce that much heat at home.)
Pan- and Immersion-Frying
What makes pan-frying different from immersion-frying? For one thing the food is touching the pan bottom as well as the fat. This provides for darker browning and thus a more intense flavor. Also, the food is not immersed; that is, one half of the food is always exposed to the air. This is especially important when the food first enters the pan and the top side is raw. Unlike with foods that are immersed, heat is pushing into pan-fried food from one side only. (See illustration, above.)
Pan-fry: oil comes ⅓ to ½ up side of food. Food still has contact with bottom of pan.
Immersion-frying is like a siege. The hot oil surrounds the food and looks for ways in. The water at the surface of the food defends its home by turning to vapor and pushing out in all directions (why most foods seem to boil furiously at the beginning of the process), which is a good reason not to over-fill the vessel.
As the water vapor exits the food, it is replaced by moisture moving up from the food’s interior. The same thing happens to the moisture in a baking potato, which explains why the center of a properly cooked french fry tastes pretty much like a baked potato.
Fried food cooks so fast that it’s actually tough to determine whether it does so via conduction or internal steam; at the very least it’s a combination of the two.
Anatomy of a French Fry
SECRETS TO MAKING GREAT FRIES
1. Start with high-starch potatoes (like russets) for fries that are crunchy on the outside and fluffy on the inside.
2. Cut potatoes in uniform pieces with a V-slicer for even cooking.
3. Soak cut potatoes in water to get rid of the excess starch on their surface. This will prevent the fries from turning dark and enable the moisture to escape via steam so that the fries aren’t gummy.
4. Fry twice. This is essential for great fries. During the first fry (at a lower temperature of 300° F), fries will go floppy and turn pale gold. During the second fry (at a higher temperature of 350° F), they’ll crisp and darken a little. Result: crispy golden outside and tender inside.
5. Now you’ve got great fries, but you’re not done yet. Fried foods have to drain properly or they’ll become greasy. Don’t use paper towels or brown paper bags; they’ll just hold the grease right up against the food. Use a draining rig instead (see illustration).
6. Last but not least, season fries while they’re hot. Why? Because salt and pepper will stick to the thin film of hot oil that remains on the surface. If you wait too long, this oil will either drip off or soak in and your seasoning will have nothing to hold on to.
Why New Fat Doesn’t Brown Well
Making Oil Last
A lot of respected cooking authorities will tell you that you should use oil once, then toss it. Fine, but where? You can’t pour it in that ditch behind the house, and pouring it down the drain would do a lot of damage to your pipes. The EPA suggests saving it, along with bacon drippings and the like, in a resealable can, which you can tape up and throw away when it gets full. Great: so every time I deep fry I’ve got to find a quart can, and seal it, and store it like so much toxic waste. If I followed this line I would never fry again. Luckily, most great fry cooks agree that oil can be reused several times, as long as it’s cleaned and stored properly and cut with new oil each time it’s used.
After I deep-fry, I