We who are about to fry salute you

(Featuring the mad photo skillz of Momentary Academic)

For a brief time during my youth, my parents owned a marvelous and wonderful kitchen contraption called a "Fry Baby." It was essentially a smaller, countertop sized version of the industrial "Fry Daddy" used in restaurants, and we used it only rarely, to make Ore-Ida french fries and St. Louis style toasted ravioli. If memory serves, its tenure in our house was fairly short lived. I can only assume it was a hassle to clean and made the house stink like Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles, as deep fryers are wont to do.

That was long ago, and I'd put the Fry Baby out of my mind almost entirely until a late night phone call in February when, for whatever reason, the subject of childhood foods came up and the words "Fry Baby" came trippingly from my tongue as though I used them in daily conversation. From that day on, the desire for a Fry Baby niggled at the back of my brain, until I finally caved in and bought a more modern version of the countertop classic.

For months it sat encased in its box on top of my refrigerator. I would toy with the idea of using it to make tater tots, and then decide it wasn't worth the hassle just to make one serving. I would think "this week, I'll make toasted ravioli," and then I'd forget to buy premade ones at the grocery, and not have time to make my own.

Then the promos for Road Tasted started airing on the Food Network, many of them featuring the following exchange:
Bobby Deen: What's better than cake?
Jaimie Deen: Fried cake.
Jordan Baker: Mmmmmmmm. . .Fried cake. . .glaaaaaarrrrrrghhhhh.
(Don't judge. You know you thought the exact same thing)

So I spent some time trying to figure out the logistics of how to fry cake in my tiny fryer*, researching different techniques for making fried desserts (twinkies, Mars Bars, Oreos) and tantalizing my friends with reports of what I'd found.

Last weekend, I came right out and said it: "Come fry with me. Let's fry, let's fry away." And Mysterygirl! and Momentary Academic did.

Mysterygirl!'s contribution to the evening was cookies: the aforementioned Oreos and Nutter Butters. We coated them thoroughly in the batter I'd made earlier in the day, and plopped them into the Rival Fryer (I've decided to name the Rival Fryer "Randy," and he will be referred to as such from here on out). The fryer was set to 350 degrees, which Randy's helpful illustrated dial informs us is also the temperature at which he cooks fried chicken. For reasons I will discuss later, I will probably set Randy higher the next time I do a dessert fry.

Here you can see the Oreos and Nutter Butters starting to plump up nicely in the oil. You can see that both kinds of cookies retain their characteristic shape, though the Nutter Butters seem to hold their batter coating a bit better (perhaps because of their waffle like indentations). The Oreo at top left stayed coated on one side but not the other, and its non coated side kept turning upward, no matter how often I poked at it with Randy's slotted straining spoon.

At right, you see the finished fried cookies. I transfered them out of the oil and placed them on an overturned cooling rack on top of a layer of paper towels (I learned this trick from an episode of Good Eats: the cooling rack helps wick the oil better). I then dusted them lightly (well, more or less lightly) with powdered sugar. If I learned nothing else at all the Navajo Heritage Festivals I went to on school field trips, I learned that anything fried tastes a million times better with powdered sugar on it.

In addition to the three intrepid Frying Blogettes, we enlisted my friend/landlord,W, and the new non-French upstairs tenant, Leadfoot as our tasters. W and Leadfoot moaned and bitched about the fact that we were torturing them and turning them into old, unloveable fatties, but that didn't stop them from chowing down. The fried Oreos were delectable--the cookie had melted into some wafer/creme hybrid substance encased in battery goodness. The Nutter Butters were good-ish, but both the taste and color were too consistent. They were uniformly beige throughout, and didn't have the strong, familiar flavor that the Oreos did. On reflection, we believe that a chocolate/peanut butter cookie, like the Girl Scouts' Peanut Butter Patties** or the delectable Reeses Cookie might be better candidates.

Our next step was frying up some candy bars. I had purchased "Fun Sized" Milky Way and Snickers bars earlier in the day, and we dredged them in batter. We did the Milky Ways first, and as you see at left, they held their shape fairly well during the inital stages of frying.

However. The candy bars produced problems the cookies had not. I'm not sure if it was because of the candy itself or the different batter we used for them, but they didn't retain their shape as well as the cookies had. As you can see at right, the batter expanded into an unrecognizable, puffy, fried shape. The candy bars also frequently "mated" with each other in Randy's gurgling oil, and had to be prized apart later. But despite their cosmetic flaws, the fried Milky Ways were absolutely delicious. As we bit into them, both Mysterygirl! and I went wide eyed and uncharacteristically silent. It was a nougaty, caramelly, melted up dream. Fry me to the moon, baby.

The boys, however, preferred the more traditional fried Snickers. Which. . .sorry, but tough shit. Those things were a hot mess, and I'm not making them again any time soon. While the other frygredients had presented some problems with melting on the inside of the puff, the Snickers melted out of the puff, resulting in a gross peanutty mess coating Randy's insides. This is why I'll probably use a higher temperature for future frying--if the outside browns and puffs up faster, then it may keep the central ingredient from melting and losing shape.

Ultimately, the fried Snickers tasted alright, but they looked weird--imagine the fried Milky Ways but completely dessicated and caved in in the middle. Very few peanuts remained in the candy itself--most of them had to be scooped out of Randy after the oil had cooled.

So the final lesson from the frying experiment: despite eating a ridiculous amount of crap this weekend and not really having a chance to go to the gym, I lost two pounds. Yep. Screw you, AMA. Fried junk food is the wave of the future.

*Still working on it. Will probably involve cupcakes.
**Which, FYI, were called "Hoedowns" back when I was a cookie pusher, before my dishonorable discharge from the Cactus-Pine Council.