Six Steps for Deep-Frying Without a Deep Fryer

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We’re big fans of deep-frying as a finishing technique after cooking sous vide. You don’t need to own a dedicated fryer. You just need a deep pot and the proper tools to insert and retrieve the food from a safe distance: long tongs, a slotted deep-fry spoon, or a frying basket. Follow the steps below for deep-frying success.

  1. Choose an appropriate frying oil, one that has a higher smoke point than the desired cooking temperature. Peanut, soybean, and sunflower oils are our favorites for frying at high temperatures. For a list of smoke and flash points of different oils, see page xxii of Modernist Cuisine at Home or 2·126 of Modernist Cuisine.
  2. Add the oil to a deep pot, but fill it no more than half full. Generally the walls of the pot should rise at least 10 cm / 4 in above the oil so that there are no spillovers. This also helps contain splattering and makes cleanup easier. Use enough oil so that you can submerge a small batch of food completely.
  3. Preheat the oil to the cooking temperature. Use a probe thermometer held upright in the center of the pan of oil to check the temperature (see the picture below). Our recipes call for frying at temperatures between 190 °C / 375 °F and 225 °C / 440 °F. That’s hot! Make sure your thermometer can display temperatures up to 260 °C / 500 °F. Frying, candy, and thermocouple thermometers usually have this much range. For consistent results, cook in small batches to minimize the cooling that occurs when you add food, and warm the food to room temperature before frying it. Allow the oil temperature to recover between batches.
  4. Pat food dry with paper towels before frying. The presence of external moisture on foods can cause oil to splatter violently. Don’t get too close to the oil. Use long tongs, a slotted deep-fry spoon, or a frying basket to insert and remove foods gently. Never use water, flour, or sugar to put out a grease fire. And do not try to carry a flaming pot outdoors. To suffocate a fire, use baking soda, a damp towel, or a fire extinguisher specifically designed for grease fires.
  5. Once food enters the hot oil, things happen fast. Just 30 seconds may be enough when you don’t want to cook the interior of the food further (for example, when deep-frying food after cooking it sous vide). Smaller pieces of food will cook faster and more evenly than larger pieces. For more on why size matters when deep-frying, see page 2·117 of Modernist Cuisine.
  6. Drain the cooked food on paper towels. Absorbing excess oil removes much of the fat associated with deep-frying. Most of the fat does not penetrate the food very far, coating only the surface. Simply blotting deep-fried food as soon as it emerges from the fryer will make it a lot less greasy. But take care that you don’t remove all of the oily coating. Oil is, after all, the source of much of the flavor, texture, and mouthfeel of deep-fried food.

Ready to try deep-frying? Check out our recipes for Starch-Infused Fries, Chicken Wings, and Cheese Puffs. And check back next week when we add another deep-fried recipe to our library.

—Adapted from Modernist Cuisine at Home and Modernist Cuisine

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Our Favorite Recipes: Chicken Wings

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I am most excited about the Korean Chicken Wings recipe in Modernist Cuisine at Home. Why? Because of the deliciousness factor! They’re amazing. Just watch the video above and see for yourself.

Developmental Chef Sam Fahey-Burke

Check back tomorrow: every day this week, we’ll bring you another of our chefs’ favorite recipes from Modernist Cuisine at Home. Visit our blog for more photos, stories, and tips.

– The Modernist Cuisine Team

Jimmy Kimmel, Cryofrying, and How to Make a Laser Omelet

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Last night Nathan was a guest on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” along with actress Jessica Alba and Congressman Barney Frank. Jimmy was very excited to meet and cook with Nathan — he’s quite the food enthusiast — in fact, he already owns a set of Modernist Cuisine and has been cooking sous vide at home for some time.

The Modernist Cuisine hamburger is a great example of the philosophy we extol in the book: even the most humble dishes can be worthy of extraordinary care and attention. You’d certainly lavish great care on your duck confit, so why not do the same for your cheeseburger? In the video below, Nathan demonstrates an abbreviated version of our cryo-frying method, which involves cooking the patty sous vide, giving it a quick dunk in liquid nitrogen, and then browning the outside by deep-frying. These steps ensure that your burger is perfectly cooked from edge to edge. But let’s be honest, it’s also pretty bad-ass.

It’s challenging to work in a kitchen adjacent to a machine shop and not get inspired to occasionally tinker. So we’ve developed a “recipe” for laser etching images onto the surface of an omelet! [Perhaps we’ll include this in a future edition of MC clip_image001] First, we make the same omelet base used in our iconic Striped Omelet recipe. We omit the mushroom stripes and instead cook a perfect disk of tender egg using a combi oven. A crucial step, it turns out, is vacuum-boiling off all of the gas trapped in the egg base before we cook it; otherwise, we’d end up with air bubbles and an uneven surface. Once the omelet cools, we put it in our laser cutter, turn the power down from “kill” to “stun,” and burn the image onto the surface. Some reconstructed cheese, cubed ham, and chives round out the dish.

This video shows the laser etching process, sped up 20x actual speed. Needless to say, the parametric recipe for the laser omelet would include additional celebrity faces.

Nathan also got to meet one of his favorite celebrities, Uggie, the Jack Russell terrier from the film The Artist. Nathan showed off a section of volume 3: Animals and Plants, and Uggie was particularly inspired by our rabbit recipe. Unsurprisingly, Uggie has a strong preference for free-range hare.

A New Recipe in Our Library: Starch-Infused Fries

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We have more than one recipe for fries in Modernist Cuisine, but to get the rest, you will have to buy the book!

Depending on whether you consider pommes pont-neuf to be a proper French fry, we have either four or five French fry recipes in Modernist Cuisine. In our most recent edition to the Recipe Library, we’ve delved into our recipe for Starch-Infused Fries and also included a video on how to make our Ultrasonic Fries.

Have you tried any of our French fry recipes? Tell us about your experiences in the comments or in our Cooks Forum.

A Modernist Christmas Feast

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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the Modernist Cuisine culinary team!

Allow me introduce myself. My name is Maxime Bilet, and I am the head chef of research and development in the culinary lab and one of the co-authors of Modernist Cuisine. It has been a very intense three-year journey of creative endeavors and accomplishments here in the kitchen. The entire Modernist Cuisine team has shared an amazing learning experience that we are excited to soon share with you. Every dish, recipe, and photo in our book tells a story of our inspirations, the seasonal bounty of the Pacific Northwest, the very unique processes that we learned to refine, and most importantly, a culinary collaboration that we hope will inspire other chefs and bring clarity and awareness to the great insights of Modernist cooking.

For me, Christmas is both a period of sharing and introspection. It can be an observance of gratitude, a celebration of life, and also a time to share with those whom we care deeply for. As chefs, our greatest gift is to create a feast of abundance. Each year, the flavors or the inspiration may change, but the intention is always to express our love for family and friends by feeding them as best we know how.

As a Frenchman, the Yuletide meal for me means goose, foie gras, chestnuts, farce, gratin d’Auphinois, roasted pears, and Bûche de Noël. Since I grew up in New York, most of my holiday meals have been a wonderful combination of American tradition and French flair. This has meant a little herb butter with the turkey, some mustard jus with the baked ham, a gratin d’Auphinois made with yams (c’est sacrilège!), or even having a praline-flavored Bûche de Noël share the table with apple pie and pecan ice cream. I have come to love baked sweet potatoes, sage-scented bread stuffing, and cranberry jelly from a can as much as any other Christmas dish.

A few weeks ago, Anjana, Grant, Johnny, Sam, and I got together and discussed what might be a way to share our Modernist interpretation of a Christmas feast, something that would exemplify our experiences together working on the book, as well as our varied cultural and life experiences. One iconic Christmas image that we all shared was the honey-glazed ham with pineapple rings and maraschino cherries. Thus, we decided that we would provide our Modernist take on this cherished dish.

For our version of honey-glazed ham, we cure and slowly cook a pork shank. Then we serve it with bright cherry gelée orbs and shaved fresh pineapple. Johnny’s simple glaze of fresh pineapple juice and honey not only brings balance to the rich and salty pork, but also unifies it with the other components.

As for the rest of the feast, we decided that a cabbage component, a sweet potato dish, and a pumpkin pie would round out our version of a Modernist Christmas meal. So, first, nothing is better than deep-fried Brussels sprouts, period. (Thank you, David Chang!) You can make anyone who hates vegetables eat Brussels sprouts simply by deep-frying them until deeply golden. They will have an incredibly complex and nutty flavor.

Our sweet potato dish consists of confit in butter cooked sous vide and topped with a delicate version of “whipped marshmallow” made by aerating a fried sage infusion. Finally, Grant worked on an elegant rendition of pumpkin pie that turned out beautifully. I’d like to think that it turned out as “Frenchie” as pumpkin pie has ever been, but since Grant is a native of the Pacific Northwest, I’ll have to settle for Modernist.

We really hope you enjoy these recipes. Happy holidays to you and yours.

Maxime.

Deep-Fried Brussels Sprouts

Yields: 4-8 portions

Ingredient Quantity Scaling Procedure
Brussels sprouts 500 g 100% Peel away outer green leaves off from Brussels sprouts and reserve.
Frying oil as needed Cut sprouts in half lengthwise and deep-fry in 190 °C / 375 °F oil for approximately 3-4 min, until deeply caramelized.Drain on paper towels.
Salt to taste Season fried Brussels sprouts to taste and reserve warm.
Brussels sprout leaves, from above as needed Blanch reserved outer leaves in boiling water for 2 min and then shock in ice water.
Unsalted butter 50 g 10% Melt butter in pot and warm blanched leaves.
Salt to taste Season leaves.
Lime juice to taste Garnish the fried sprouts with the sautéed leaves.Season with lime juice.

Christmas Ham Hock with Pineapple and Cherries

Yields: 4-8 portions

Ingredient Quantity Scaling Procedure
Ham hock, fresh, with skin on and bone in 900 g 100% Set hock aside, combine all other components for liquid cure and dissolve.
Water 2 kg 222% Submerge hock with cure and vacuum seal.
Salt 200 g 22% Cure hock refrigerated for 3 d.
Brown sugar 80 g 8.8% Remove hock from brine, rinse and vacuum seal.
Sodium nitrate, optional (for color) 20 g 2.2% Refrigerate vacuum-sealed hock for 24 h.
Black peppercorns 10 g 1.1% Cook sous vide at 65 °C / 149 °F for 48 h.
Coriander seeds 10 g 1.1% Remove hock from bag and clean away any excess gelatin.
Cloves 4 g 0.4% Pat dry and reserve.
Pineapple juice, fresh 320 g 35% Combine juice and honey in pot.
Clear liquid honey 80 g 8.8% Reduce over medium high heat until syrupy, about 10 min.Reserve warm.

Deep-fry cooked pork shank in 200 °C / 390 °F oil until golden brown and slightly puffed, about 3 min.

Brush with glaze and slice to desired thickness off of bone.
Fresh pineapple, peeled 50 g 5.5% Slice 3 mm / ? in thick and punch out coins with 4 cm / 1½ in diameter ring mold.
Black cherry juice (from bottled) 100 g 100% Season cherry juice as desired. It will be a seasoning for the pork, so be generous about acidity and sweetness.
Fructose to taste Blend in calcium gluconolactate and xanthan gum to fully disperse.
Malic acid to taste
Calcium gluconolactate 1 g 1% Vacuum seal and refrigerate for 1 h to hydrate.
Xanthan gum 0.15 g 0.15% Pour into silicone hemisphere molds and freeze.
Water 500 g 100% Combine and heat to dissolve to make setting bath for cherry spheres.
Sodium alginate 2.5 g 0.5% Heat bath to a simmer and remove from heat.Drop frozen cherry spheres into hot sodium alginate bath.

Allow spheres to set in bath until the center of each sphere is no longer frozen, about 3 min.

Rinse spheres in hot water three times and reserve in fresh warm water until ready to serve.

Arrange thinly sliced pork with cherry spheres and pineapple. Serve with Brussels sprouts and sweet potato confit on side.

Garnet Yam Fondant with Sage Foam

Yields: 4-8 portions

Ingredient Quantity Scaling Procedure
Red garnet yam, peeled 175 g 175% Peel and use ring cutter to cut out tubes measuring 4 cm / 1½ in. in diameter and 6 cm / 2¼ in thick.
Water 125 g 125% Combine all and vacuum seal.
Unsalted clarified butter 27.5 g 27.5% Cook sous vide at 90 °C / 194 °F for 1 h 20 min.
Salt 4.5 g 4.5% Drain and remove from bag. Cool or serve immediately.
For yam chip:
Red garnet yam as needed Slice into 1 mm / 1?16 in sheets on mandolin.
Punch out disks that are 3 cm / 1¼ in. in diameter and reserve.
Isomalt 100 g 100% Combine all and bring to a boil to make syrup.
Sugar 100 g 100% Blanch yam disks in the syrup for about 15 s.
Water 100 g 100% Lay on nonstick tray and dehydrate at 62 °C / 145 °F for 12 h.
Maple syrup (Grade B) 40 g 40%
For sage foam:
Frying oil as needed Fry sage in 190 °C / 375 °F oil for about 10 s.
Sage 40 g 40% Drain on absorbent paper towels.
Water 300 g 300% Combine with fried sage leaves and vacuum seal.Cook sous vide at 90 °C / 194 °F for 30 min.

Strain and cool sage infusion.
Sugar 100 g 100% Add and dissolve into sage infusion.
Versawhip 3 g 3% Whip with electric whisk to form stiff peaks.
Xanthan gum 0.45 g 0.45% Spoon over sweet potatoes and garnish with yam chips.

Pumpkin Pie: Butternut Squash Custard

Yields: 600 g

Ingredient Quantity Scaling Procedure
Butternut squash, peeled and cubed 550 g 110% Place all ingredients in pressure cooker and cook at full pressure (15 psi) for 20 min.
Unsalted butter 110 g 22% Remove lid and reduce until the bottom of the pan is barely wet. Remove spices.
Water 100 g 20% Puree squash mixture, and pass through fine sieve.
Maple syrup (Grade B) 50 g 10% Measure 500 g of puree for recipe.
Salt 2 g 0.40%
Cinnamon stick 0.8 g 0.16%
Clove 0.25 g 0.05%
Mace 0.25 g 0.05%
Squash puree, from above 500 g 100% Place all in Thermomix and blend for 1 min.
Heavy cream 90 g 18% Turn on heat and continue blending until 90 °C / 194 °F is reached.
Maple syrup (Grade B) 40 g 8% Cast onto pastry table with bars at a thickness of 1.5 cm / ½ in until firmly set.
Salt 2 g 0.4% Refrigerate until use.
Toasted walnut oil 10 g 2%
Iota carregeenan 1.48 g 0.3%
Kappa carregeenan 1.48 g 0.3%

Pumpkin Pie: Ginger Cream

Yields: 250 g

Ingredient Quantity Scaling Procedure
Heavy cream 200 g 100% Whip all to medium peaks.
Sugar 40 g 20% Pipe 1 cm / ? in tip into cylinders with sides touching to make sheets.
Ginger juice, raw and fresh 15 g 7.5% Freeze completely.
Toasted walnut oil 7 g 3.5%
Xanthan gum 0.25 g 0.125%

Pumpkin Pie: Caramelized Crust

Yields: 600 g

Ingredient Quantity Scaling Procedure
Pastry flour 350 g 140% Blend in food processor and reserve.
Unsalted butter 250 g 100%
Ice water 105 g 42% Dissolve sugar and salt into water.
Sugar 15 g 6% In large bowl, pour flour and butter mixture over the liquid mixture.
Salt 10 g 4% Mix until just incorporated.Place on silicone mat and press into layer about 2.5 cm / 1 in thick.

Place in refrigerator and let rest for 1 h.

Remove and roll out 3 mm / ? in thick.

Rest in refrigerator for 1 h.

Bake in 160 °C / 320 °F oven until golden, about 18 min.
Maple syrup (Grade B) 100 g 40% Heat in pot until just melted and whisk to emulsify.
Unsalted butter 50 g 20% Brush all over the pastry crust and bake in 190 °C / 375 °F oven until dry, about 10 min.
Salt 2 g 0.8%
Pumpkin Pie: AssemblyYields: 4 portions
Ingredient Quantity Scaling Procedure
Butternut squash custard square 4 squares Cut crusts to desired dimensions.Cut custard to fit on top of crust, with crust evenly exposed on edges.

Cut frozen ginger cream into the same dimensions as the custard. Be sure to place cream on top while still frozen.

Transfer to serving dish.

Garnish with orange zest, grated walnut, and walnut oil.
Ginger cream 4 pieces
Caramelized crust 4 crusts
Orange zest, finely grated 4 shavings
Toasted walnuts, finely grated 16 walnuts
Walnut oil as needed

A Chip Off The Old…Watermelon?

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The joy of breaking into a fresh bag of potato chips is universal. It’s hard to resist losing yourself to bite after bite of salty, crunchy fried starch. In most grocery stores, novel alternatives such as beet, yam, and cassava chips have become commonplace. But until now, the common denominator in all of these variations has been a high starch content.

As the starchy main ingredient is deep-fried, the gelatinization of the starch gives structure and crunch to the resulting chips. However, that same inherently high starch content produces a much less exciting side effect — namely, all of these chips tend to taste bland before seasoning. Sweet, tart, and naturally moist vegetation tends to burn, shrink, or fall apart when deep-fried naked. But what if you were able to impart the structural advantages of high starch content to plant foods that possess zippier flavor profiles? Can chips made from less starchy plants be stabilized enough to withstand the deep-frying process? If so, which plants yield the best results?

To see how far we could take this premise, we tested a variety of fruits and vegetables with typically high water contents. Ultimately, we found that watermelon produced the most striking results. The method we chose to impregnate the starch into the watermelon is the same technique used in many Modernist kitchens to impregnate or concentrate intense flavors: vacuum compression.

Johnny slices and vacuum seals a sliver of watermelon dipped in the slurry.

We started by slicing watermelon to a thickness of about one millimeter using a meat slicer. Then we brushed on a slurry made of starch and water, vacuum sealed the slices, and let them rest for about 30 minutes.

Max demonstrates the vacuum compression process.

After the watermelon slices were given sufficient time to be impregnated with the starch, they were patted dry and deep-fried.

Johnny and Max deep-fry and enjoy an entirely new type of chip.

The result was amazing: A light, crispy chip loaded with the concentrated flavor of watermelon. Apple, jalapeño, and dill pickle were some of the other successful results we achieved with this method.

What would you like to see made into a chip? Leave a comment and let us know!