Deep Frying Food at Home

One of the tastiest, best tasting and most amazing ways to cook a food and make it taste fantastic, deep frying often scares many cooks away. 

They say they avoid frying at home because deep frying at home is messy, smelly, dangerous, expensive, wasteful, annoying, and unhealthy. Though all these complaints have a logical basis, most of them can be easily avoided.

Do you operate your propane barbecue inside your home? No 

Do you operate your backup generator inside your home? No

Why would be operate a deep fryer, pot filled with hot oil, wok filled with oil or deep frying setup that emits fumes, smoke, oil vapors and is a mess that makes your home smell for days? 

Frying food does not have to make the inside of your home messy and smelly, and if you find that it does then just do it outside, or in a large 12in carbon steel wok with less oil (32 oz) for a 9in diameter pool of hot oil with about 2 inch deep in the middle, and operate this under the fume hood over the stove in the kitchen with exhaust fan turned onto the II or higher setting. Meg & I added activated carbon filtering being the stainless steel screen in the fume hood over the stove to capture more chemicals from the exhaust. 

You can easily deep fry on your deck, patio, driveway, in the garage with the door up, on an improvised table outside, near your home. You can even use a heavy 12 gauge 3 wire extension cord into a dedicated outlet to drag power outside to use a resistive coil heater or single burner induction heater to heat the oil. 

You can also use many different kinds of oil to deep fry, and the oil choice can have a huge effect on the nutrition and flavor, and possible cooling, filter capture with a funnel into some glass jars with lids and you can probably use the same oil at least 4 times or more. 

Peanut oil has the best price to performance ratio and widespread availability. Cash & carry, or ask them to buy some at Five Guys, you can find it at Costco, Fred Meyer, Safeway and many other stores. 

Choosing your oil wisely makes for a better overall experience, lower cost, and better taste! 

Tips for Deep Frying

Use a thermometer and aim for 400 F before cold food added so the temp drop goes to 360

Fry in the correct container for your batch size, smaller batches in a wok use less oil

Deep Frying Procedure

A. Get everything setup before you start, paper towel in the a bowl & salt or seating, your fryer pan or pot or deep fryer, then a baking trey or plate trey with your pre-prepped cut up foods. 

B. Think about the layout of your setup, and aim to fry in a left to right or right to left workflow setup.

C. Use a metal net spoon basket net to lower the cold raw or batter coated food into the hot oil for about 90- 500 seconds

D. Once the fried food is golden brown in color, turn off the heat or power so the oil starts to cool, and take the fried food out of the oil with the net spoon and place into a paper towel lined bowl. 

E. Give a light toss, then remove the paper towel from the bowl leaving the food behind, and immediately sprinkle salt or other seasonings into the bowl and give the food a toss in the salty seasoning. 

Fried Foods Taste Amazing 

Now you have salty fried food thats fantastically boom sauce awesome delicious and tasty. Yummy! 

** Cation, do not over crowd your oil, fry a net basket spoon full or small batches and enjoy at once! 

* Salt and or season your fried food immediately after the food done frying as the residual oil helps the salt or seasoning stick to and flavor the food. 

Wipe down any surfaces you seek to keep clean from oil droplets or oil spatter immediately after finishing. Clean with warm water and soap or paper towels or similar.

You can cool, filter capture in a funnel with a coffee filter the used warm oil into glass jars with lids to reuse the fry oil a few more times. The trick is to filter the warm oil to take out any burnt food particles.

Don't try to fry for a lot of people rapidly in a small setup, that results in too much food being added in quick succession, not enough room in the oil or crowding, a bigger temperature drop since more cold food will cold crash the oil temperature more, and results in uneven or inconsistent results. 

Watch This YouTube video to learn more https://youtu.be/ANtMFKfV3kE?si=y4_ltBGMd4UnRmNQ

Used Frying Oil to Biodiesel Easily

Many restaurants, grocery stores, and other businesses that cook, have a large dark blue or black painted steel oil recycling dumpster vessel in the back of the parking lot, where you can open the lid and pour your container of spent oxidize foul frying oil so that it can be turned into biodiesel to help reduce petroleum use and emissions, thus making the world a better place.