Question: Can you deep fry with butter?
Ignore for a moment whether you’d personally want to. It just seems like something that would be trendy if possible. Maybe pre-recession trendy, cause that much butter isn’t cheap, but trendy along high meets low comfort food lines. Or something up Paula Deen’s alley.
Answer:
Whether you can deep fry with a fat is dependent on the smoke point – above which an fat/oil becomes unusable. According to Wikipedia and Google books version of What Einstein told his cook, deep frying requires fat at a temperature of 345–375 °F. Without a lot of care, the temperature may reach 400 °F.
Regular butter, smoke point = 350 °F – no, too low
Your average clarified butter (butter w/ milk solids removed), smoke point = around 400 °F – tempting fate
Ghee (Indian clarified butter w/o any water), smoke point = 485 °F – deep fryable!
Other than cost, my best guess for why deep frying with ghee isn’t the rage is that a lot of the buttery taste is in the butter fat. Ghee has a unique taste of its own though, would be interesting…
Also, in my research found the fantastic Cooking for Engineers website. Worth checking out.
This book looks pretty interesting too:
Travel food – Fennel Confit and Caponata (though for traveling I didn’t use my fancy bento box)
First – you may have noticed that Salty Week didn’t happen. I overestimated my ability/desire to post while making a poster for a meeting, attending that meeting, and attending two graduate school interviews. Lesson possibly learned. Salty week is still to come.
To make up for it, I want to share some tips about eating and traveling from my past year of travel. (According to TripIt + mental calculation of road trips in the past year, I’m at 30,000+ miles. I need to go carbon offset shopping.)
- Know when and what food will be available to you.
Obvious but I’ve only really started doing this recently. A year ago an all day Southwest flight (only peanuts to eat) from Tampa to San Francisco, with a stopover in Chicago during which we couldn’t leave the plane, left me starving and now mindful of these details. Read the rest of this entry »
Like Caponata, fennel and garlic confit is a regular on my recipe rotation. It’s flexible with what I have in the kitchen (garlic can be replaced or supplemented with shallots or onions) and can be made more or less healthy or vegan by modifying the butter and oil quantities. And once I’ve got some in the fridge, with some toasted pita it’s the perfect satisfying snack or part of dinner.
Since I have been making it, I have modified it slightly from the original recipe from The Kitchn. (If you look at the original recipe, the fennel fronds burnt and the thin lemon slices resulted in a bitter confit so I dropped them.)
Recipe and pictures after the jump…
Read the rest of this entry »
My formative cooking years included a vegetarian coop and an Armenian roommate. From the two, one basic cooking strategy I have developed is: buy fresh vegetables, chop them up, saute them with whatever you have around, add canned tomatoes. Caponata falls into this strategy and having a recipe taught me to add red wine vinegar and put the tomatoes in later than I would have otherwise. The result is very tasty.
The recipe is really easy and can be modified to your heart’s/taste’s desire. I only faltered at toasting pine nuts. I am a terrible toaster. If anyone has any no-fail toasting tips, send them along. To quote a Food Network chef, “toasting takes as long as it takes you to forget that you’re toasting.” Which is exactly my experience both in the oven and on the stove.
Pictures and recipe after the jump…
Read the rest of this entry »
Salty on your taste buds, how salt brings out other flavors, salting to taste, double salt licorice. All before I go to Salt Lake City on Thursday. (A coincidence, I swear.)
To start you off:
Salts of the Earth, an article about sea salts.
My favorite fancy salt:
Lavender Salt from Eatwell Farm
I’ll hold off on digestion for a while.
As The Flavor Bible describes it, taste is “what is perceived by the taste buds.” In common use, “taste” also includes what is we perceive through our noses while eating, but we’ll start by just addressing taste in the mouth. In the mouth, most taste buds are on the tongue (though taste buds have also been found throughout the mouth). Taste buds are visible to the naked eye by using a mirror and sticking out your tongue. (They’re the little bumps.)
This is a diagram of the inside of a taste bud:
From Wikipedia Images
While food is in your mouth, it is broken down by chewing and saliva. Some molecules find their way into the taste pore (labeled on the top of image). Read the rest of this entry »
Greek Panzanella Salad
My mom and I made this tasty bread salad from House Beautiful’s Ask the Barefoot Contessa column last night. (The recipe itself is not on House Beautiful’s website yet.)
Review = Yum. I love bread salad, specifically, all the different textures and how the flavors soak into the bread. This Greek version had a nice balance of crunch (cucumbers and bread), sweet (tomatoes, bell peppers), salty (olives), and tangy (onions, dressing). Also it assuaged my guilt for not finishing really good Ciabatta from Bread and Cie.
Even with the simplest of recipes I often mess something up and this was no exception. Read the rest of this entry »
Earlier this week Wired wrote about Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham’s talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting. Dr. Wrangham spoke about the evolutionary advantages to cooking.
In a numbered list:
- Kills parasites. (Preventing us from getting sick.)
- Heat softens food making it less energy intensive to digest. (Less energy spent digesting food is more energy for other things.)
- Heat breaks down starch and protein which increases the body’s ability to digest them. (For the same amount of food, we get more starch/carbs and proteins cooked than raw.)
Evolutionarily, when humans learned to control fire (up to 790,000 years ago) and cook their food, eating became more energy/nutrient efficient (2 = less energy in and 3 = more energy/nutrients out). This may well have played a big part in supporting the energy needs of the human brain, allowing us to evolve such big smart crazy connected brains (the accurate scientific phrasing clearly).
Related:
Book sized story from Dr. Wrangham available in June. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
To understand the experience of eating, one step is to define the components that go into that experience. Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg’s description of flavor in The Flavor Bible
(highly recommended!) defines the components more elegantly than I could:
FLAVOR = TASTE + MOUTHFEEL + AROMA + “THE X FACTOR”
Taste = What is perceived by the taste buds
Mouthfeel – What is perceived by the rest of the mouth
Aroma = What is perceived by the nose
“The X Factor” = What is perceived by the other senses — plus the heart, mind, and spirit
Scientific detail on each will follow in future posts, but the basics (summarized from The Flavor Bible and coursework):
Taste happens in the mouth, primarily on the tongue. The taste buds have 5 kinds of sensors (called receptors) which sense sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami (savory).
Mouthfeel happens in the mouth. Exactly as the name implies, it’s feeling (or touching) with our mouths, just like we feel with our hands, feet, etc. The sensation include temperature, texture, piquancy (or spicyness), and astringency (causing puckering). Read the rest of this entry »
