CONNOISSEUR:Deep frying seals the food inside the batter, trapping the flavour, so it cooks in an envelope of its own flavoured steam, writes HUGO ARNOLD.
JOE BAILEY SURFS the waves of our food trends with a certain sanguine hint of inevitability, but underneath there is a real passion. Does he lead or follow, I cannot help wonder, as he explains the merits of a pressurised deep-fat fryer. I can detect a certain gleam in his eye, which suggests the former.
Deep frying is a fascinating cooking medium. The day before, I had been at Paul Flynn’s new cookery school in Dungarvan where he fried a piece of plaice to crisp perfection. The eating was a thrilling combination of sweet succulent fish with feathery light crisp batter and not a drop of excess oil in sight. Beer was the secret, he told us, any beer. In truth, the temperature of the oil was pretty crucial too, and the fact he was cooking one small piece of fish.
Which explains Joe’s enthusiasm for his pressurised version. His turbo-charged, fully programmable, clamp-on stainless steel vat could do 10 if not 20 times the amount of fish in half the time and still leave a crispy result.
Ten years ago a piece of fried breaded chicken bought from even the most basic food outlet would have been cooked from raw. Now, not only is it cooked from cooked, but the breadcrumbs will have been stuck on with a cocktail of edible glue at a factory far, far away.
There are times when the only food I want to eat is chicken. There is something profoundly comforting about a roast bird, but I am also partial to the legs and thighs pot-roasted in butter and oil with thyme and whole cloves of garlic, the whole assembly dressed with little more than lemon juice or a splash of white wine. There was a time when breadcrumbed breast of freshly cooked chicken was readily available delivering flavour, texture and satisfaction. Not quite your roast perhaps, but not too far off. These days the safety police have made almost all food-service outlets terrified of even handling raw meat, far less cooking it.
Deep frying works on the principle of sealing the food inside the batter, trapping the flavour, so it cooks in an envelop of its own flavoured steam. Succulence is assured. Flavour, provided your chicken is a good one and has been seasoned correctly, is a given. Think of the perfect fluffy chip, the crisp succulence of an Indian samosa, a crunchy Chinese spring roll, a moist and nutty Lebanese falafel. All are deep fried and all utterly delicious when done well.
Joe’s company, Martin Food Equipment, is one of the largest suppliers of kit to the food-service market. A great number of those gleaming stainless steel boxes – be they cookers or fridges and in a Spar or petrol station – come from him, so he knows a great deal about frying chicken.
Drop food into hot oil and steam escapes in a bubbling mass of energy – one of the chief reasons not to deep-fry food at home. And if the temperature of the oil drops too far – which happens if too much food is added to the oil at once – the food starts to absorb the fat. So you end up with a loss of moisture leading to dry food and food which is greasy.
A pressurised fryer allows you to cook at a lower temperature without the food absorbing the fat as it would in a conventional fryer. As a result, the food is more succulent, tastier and healthier.
So we come back to the pressurised fryer. Or at least we would if people selling chicken would wake up to how good it can be. Handling raw food is not a complicated business, but health and safety concerns have strangled any assessment of taste and flavour. So we poor customers get tasteless re-cooked chicken instead of something delicious.
Soon, Joe assures me, somebody is going to wake up to the potential of returning to the old way of doing things. “KFC was built on an incredibly simple formula. Fried chicken tastes good. It really is that simple. But it does have to be done well.”
www.martinfoodequip.com