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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How to Calibrate Your Kitchen

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We’ve heard of chefs who claim that they can tell temperature by pressing a thermometer to their lips. Setting aside the problem that this technique could lead to a trip to the emergency room, the approach seems highly vulnerable to human error. Leaving temperature control to intuition is a recipe for disaster: dry and rubbery chicken, under-cooked fish, and scalded milk. What’s more, when cooking at low temperatures, being off just a degree or two can make your food not just unpalatable but downright dangerous to eat.

That’s why the most important tool in your kitchen is a quality thermometer, followed closely by a setup that allows you to set the temperature of the cooking environment with precision. With temperature under close control, chefs can relax and devote more of their creative brain power to flavor combinations and new textures.

Cooking food sous vide (sealed, in a low-temperature water bath) is one of the easiest and most affordable ways to achieve such control. Modernist Cuisine and Modernist Cuisine at Home include hundreds of our favorite recipes for sous vide dishes. We exploit this technique, for example, to slow-cook chicken to juicy perfection while also pasteurizing it, which requires a minimum holding time at the final temperature to knock any germs down to a safe level. It’s crucial to be able to trust your thermometer, because if it reads 60° C / 140 °F when the temperature is actually several degrees cooler than that, the chicken may not be fully pasteurized when you serve it.

Fortunately, high-quality thermometers are widely available and relatively inexpensive. We prefer digital thermometers because they are easy to read and switch instantly between Celsius and Fahrenheit. Moreover, better models, such as Thermocouple’s Platinum RTD probes, are accurate to about half a degree Celsius (a bit less than one degree Fahrenheit). Even inexpensive digital oven probes are accurate to within 1.5 °C / 2.7 °F, even at low temperature. Analog thermometers, in contrast, are all but useless at low temperatures, and spike-and-dial varieties typically vary up to 2.5 °C / 4.5 °F from the true temperature.

These accuracy numbers all presuppose that your thermometer is properly calibrated, not a safe assumption for many off-the-shelf products. So whenever you buy a new thermometer, calibrate it right away by using the simple, tried-and-true method of verifying that it reads 0 °C / 32 °F in water stirred with crushed ice and 100 °C / 212 °F in water at a full boil (but note that water boils at lower temperatures at elevations above sea level, so you may need to look up the normal boiling temperature at your location). Be sure the thermometer probe doesn’t touch the sides of the container, and give it a few minutes to settle on a final reading. If your thermometer hits these targets on the nose, it is suitable for sous vide and other low-temperature cooking methods. But if your thermometer is off by 2 °C / 4 °F or more, return it for a new one or take it to a professional to adjust it.

Once your thermometer is dialed in, you can move on calibrating other parts of your kitchen. You probably won’t notice a difference in your cooking if your oven is off by a degree or two, but if you can’t set an oven temperature below 200 °F / 95 °C, it isn’t suitable for dehydrating food or slow-cooking a frozen steak to medium rare. Because ovens are notoriously inaccurate at their lower ends, be sure to calibrate your oven at several lower temperatures before relying on it for slow baking or braising.

To calibrate your oven, you need a thermometer with a probe and digital display, tethered together by an oven-safe wire. Preheat your oven fully to its lowest available setting (give it a little extra time to settle), and then clip your probe to the oven rack so that the tip of the probe is near the center of the cavity and points upward and inward. Close the oven door, wait a few minutes for the oven to recover its temperature, and then note the temperature you set as well as the reading on the thermometer. Repeat with the probe placed near a back corner and then near the door. Next, increase the temperature by 30 °C / 50 °F, and repeat. It takes some time to record these measurements for the entire range of your oven, but you only need to do it once, and the resulting picture of your oven’s performance is invaluable. You may learn, for example, why your quirky oven burns cookies on the right side of the sheet even while cookies in the back left corner stay stubbornly raw. Oven walls radiate heat unevenly, so you should expect to see some temperature variations within the cavity. Once you know their magnitude and location, you can compensate for them.

As in an oven, the temperature inside your refrigerator is warmer on some shelves than others; the door compartments are often the warmest. This can pose a safety risk if the temperature in any part of the refrigerator exceeds 5 °C / 40 °F. It is wise to set your refrigerator to a temperature that causes lower shelves to drop below freezing if that is what must be done to keep the top shelves in the door within a safe range.

To test the temperature of your refrigerator, place glasses of water in it at various locations, including the door and the top and bottom shelves. Wait several hours and then measure the temperature of the water (take care not to let the probe touch the sides of the glass). Adjust the refrigerator setting if needed, and then repeat to confirm that all parts are at or below 5 °C / 40 °F.

When cooking or cleaning up after a meal, never put food in the refrigerator or freezer while it’s still hot. We used an infrared camera to visualize how much a bowl of hot leftovers warms the surrounding food in the refrigerator, and the results were shocking. The temperature can rise dramatically and stay above the safety zone for hours, long enough for food to spoil.

Finally, use a thermometer rated for subzero temperatures (many digital ones aren’t) to check the temperature inside your freezer. Generally speaking, the lower the better, because fast freezing produces the smallest ice crystals and the least damage to foods as they solidify. But as long as the temperature is -15 °C / 5 °F or lower, you needn’t worry about microbes multiplying in the frozen food.

No one claims that calibrating your kitchen is fun. But it is important, and once you’ve done it, all your cooking will go more smoothly. You can then focus more of your attention on the creative aspects of cooking without worrying so much about being thwarted (or even made ill) by the vagaries of temperature.

Click here to put your newly calibrated oven to use, cooking steak straight from the freezer!

Top 5 Modernist Cuisine at Home Tools

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Maybe you gave someone Modernist Cuisine at Home, or perhaps you have it yourself. Now you want to know what to give with it, or what else to put on your own wish list. These are our top five suggestions.

  1. Right now, both Polyscience and SousVide Supreme have great packages.

    Digital Scale: We are very keen on precision. A digital scale allows chefs to accurately measure out Modernist ingredients, some of which can drastically alter your recipe if measured imprecisely. We recommend a scale that weighs out to a tenth of a gram because many recipes with Modernist ingredients may call for amounts as little as 0.3 g. We like the Digital Bench Scale. While our recipes in Modernist Cuisine at Home don’t call for accuracy in hundredths of a gram, you may still want to consider a scale that measures to the hundredths. If you are cutting a recipe in half, however, and it originally calls for 0.3 g, you’ll want to be able to measure out 0.15 g. For such precision, we like the Digital Pocket Scale. For something cheaper and ultraportable, try the American Weigh Signature Series.

  2. Digital Thermometer: As Nathan often says, “Why waste time being a human thermostat?” For cooking meat sous vide to precise temperatures, you’ll need a good thermometer. We like Taylor’s Professional Thermocouple and ThermoWorks’s Splash-Proof Thermapen, but if you are looking for something a bit cheaper, you may want to go with a digital oven probe.

    We make everything from carnitas to stocks to risotto in our pressure cooker.
  3. Sous Vide Setup: Sous vide cooking is becoming more and more popular, hence finding sous vide machines in stores is now easier. In making Modernist Cuisine at Home, we used the SousVide Supreme alongside various models from Polyscience. The SousVide Supreme is a little more affordable, but right now both companies have some great offers. PolyScience is offering the Sous Vide Professional (CREATIVE Series) with a copy of Modernist Cuisine at Home for just $599. SousVide Supreme is offering their model, a copy of the book, and a vacuum sealer for $599.
  4. Pressure Cooker: When shopping for a pressure cooker, you’ll want to look for one with a spring valve. This is the best choice for stocks and sauces because the valve seals the cooker before it is vented. This traps most of the aromatic volatiles before they can escape. We love our Kuhn Rikon pressure cooker, but if you are looking for something a little cheaper, try Fagor.

    Foaming is just one of many functions of a whipping siphon.
  5. Whipping Siphon: Whipping siphons are one of our favorite kitchen gadgets. We use them for everything from making foams to carbonating fruit to marinating meat. We use them interchangeably with carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide cartridges, depending on what we want to do (note that you can do this with a whipping siphon but not with a soda siphon). We prefer iSi’s Gourmet Whipping Siphon, but there are many options available. Try to find one that holds a full liter, but smaller versions work too.

 

If you are looking for more ideas, we have you covered. Check out our Gear Guide where we discuss ovens, microwaves, silicone mats, blenders, and grills, just to name a few.