Deep Frying at Home is a GREAT IDEA | A response to Adam Ragusea

in general I think that deep-frying at home is a great cooking technique to learn at least for me my situation may be different but I reckon that it's fairly common to most home kitchens I don't use any special equipment or have an industrial grade kitchen in fact with the proper training and knowledge I think that deep frying is one of the easier methods to making delicious foods at home and this is coming from someone who just maybe a year or two ago before learning how to set up and fry food correctly probably would have agreed with Adam Ragusa so obviously this video is in response to Adams video that deep frying at home is a bad idea this video is not sponsored by Nord VPN nor is it meant to attack Adam personally he is completely entitled to have his own opinions and I actually do dig a lot of the stuff I've seen on his channel but the fact that his message of that video is kind of underlined to say don't try this cooking technique at home is something that I'm just fundamentally against you see I've showcased deep frying on the channel several times before and when I share them I want you to go out and try them I want you to make the double down sandwich from KFC I want you to make chicken nuggets that use booze in the batter and drive McDonald's Nuggets to shame I want you to make gorgeously crispy french fries for your friends in fact after learning about deep frying how to set it up how to make it safe how to make it not wasteful it all really and no it doesn't smell either I want you to go out and try it and then once you do try it come back and say hey deep-frying is for me or maybe maybe it's still not for you and that's perfectly okay but don't let two guys like me or Adam tell you what's right and wrong for your home kitchen you decide for yourself for this video I'll present Adams perspective on a number of topics like what do you fry in frying in small batches maintaining the temperature and the smell of the oil then I'll provide my perspective because I found a lot of his reasons to be generalized and exaggerated for example he frequently uses terms like time-consuming or messy or that the oil smells without actually addressing considerations to how to remedy those or exactly how much time is being wasted and then at the end of the video he posits that pan-fried chicken is a perfectly fine substitute to deep fried however I can see the exact same issues arising because of how he's actually going about the pan-frying for my perspectives I'll give you as much specific and actionable advice as possible to make your next deep frying adventure a breeze and also a lot of this information is from the food lab by Kenji Lopez I'll link that down below would HIGHLY remain checking it out if you want to learn a lot more about home cooking but with that being said let's hop into the first part of video first dilemma what do you fry an but even in this huge pot the most oil I can safely fry in is 2 or 3 quarts you have to leave space for the displacement of the food and enough head room at the top for things to be able to slosh around without spilling over the sides so what do I think is the best pot to frying for a home cook well it's a wok and it honestly solves probably about 95% of the issues that Adam mentions in this video due to the sloped nature of a wok you actually use less oil than a large Dutch oven and you get this same amount of surface area on top for your fried goodies to enjoy their own space additionally the wideness of a wok will catch plenty of oil splatter that normally ends up on the countertops which if not cleaned up right away starts to smell up the kitchen this is why using a wok for deep frying is probably my number one tip for deep frying at home if you want a fry dainty long thin fries you got to fry them in tiny little batches otherwise you'd bash them apart while you stirred them around or they'd stick to the bottom of the pan or they'd stick to each other so I agree that you do need to fry in small batches but unless you are a fast food chain like McDonald's or chick-fil-a who needs to churn out orders and orders of fries and chicken nuggets I mean smaller restaurants are going to be frying in small batches too for example in the restaurant clip that Adam showed I mean that fry basket had a handful of onion rings chopped into it for a single serving which is how a lot of restaurants are probably gonna do their servings and this is me dropping a batch of fries into the wok I mean that's enough fries for at least two people I would say or maybe one hungry one and for the fryer recipe that I use the fries are in the oil for 50 seconds during the first dry and then 3.5 minutes for the second fry so each extra batch requires only an extra four minutes 20 seconds which doesn't seem like too much to me and here's what Adam himself thinks about saving four minutes they've saved a whopping four minutes on their drive Wow whatever will you do with all your spare time but you got to overshoot the mark when you're heating it up because look what happens when you put this much cold mass into such a small volume of hot oil the temperature plummets there's no denying that the food is going to drop the temperature of the oil more in a small volume of oil compared to a much larger one but we can easily work around this you see we can reduce the effect by frying in small batches and keeping that oil moving so no cold pockets are present additionally since that we know the oil temperature is going to drop people like Adam and I who are sharing recipes on how to cook we should help people account for it for example in Kenji Lopez's Food Lab he says hey start the oil at 400 greased Fahrenheit it's likely going to drop around 360 degrees so I know what to expect when I try that fry recipe and then I could do the same when I share it with all of you ok let's think for a second about how insanely dangerous this bubbling cauldron of death is so how exactly do we keep deep-frying safe and manageable for the home cook first up we are using the wide and high sides of wok and only filling the oil up about a third to a halfway with oil this is going to catch plenty of oil splatter when we drop our food in also we monitor the temperature at crazy high temperatures food will splatter all over but don't let it get to that stage always use a thermometer set up your workstation know exactly the movements you are going to use for my fries for example I move left to right raw potatoes go into the oil to blanch then the blanch ones go to the baking sheet on the right lastly fry in small batches less food in the hot oil means less water that is going to be dehydrated and bubbled up which is where splatters happen and when doing something like chicken for example slowly lowered into the oil and release it at the last second if that oil is at 350 degrees like my fried chicken recipe it's not gonna go batshit crazy and blow up in my face that's why it was testing it before sharing these are simple tenets for deep frying at home this stage called blanching I did for about 10 minutes fries take a long time and you might be thinking man couldn't you have solved all of your problems here by just frying in way smaller batches well yeah but fries are only good if you eat them right away what's the point of perfectly frying a tiny batch of fries if they're just gonna get soggy while they there and you fry the rest so this complaint is specific to Adams fry recipe which takes 10 minutes to blanch a single large batch of potatoes but the recipe that I use for kimchi just takes 50 seconds per batch at 400 degrees Fahrenheit this means that I could have done 11 batches of fries this size by the time Adam got his single batch done [Music] also the blanch fries don't need to be placed on a wire rack which is just another thing to clean lay them on paper towels over a baking sheet let the paper towels soak up the oil and do the work for you then after the fries do go through the second fry you remove the oil soaked paper towel and give the sheet maybe a 15 20 second scrub under hot water I mean here's what my kitchen looked like right after the fry so we just got filming these delicious french fries right here and as you can see really not that messy so that will just throw right away the paper towel and go to quick rinse this I'm going to be let that cool and throw that in a mason jar and probably like 15 minutes that just got to throw it away and do a rinse got to put that stuff away and then if there's any excess oil on my counter I just do like a quick little wipe away because not getting rid of oil right away like that's gonna make that oil linger a little bit so if you do have some splashes just clean them up right away nothing to worry about it's really not a big time-consuming process or really messy I don't know about you but that doesn't look too messy or time-consuming to me but again I'll let you decide we also have a giant pot of hot oil sitting on the stove making the whole house smell like a County Fair really the smell is gross and it lingers for days this one is simple clean oil doesn't stink up the kitchen it's burnt and unclean oil that stinks up the kitchen when we fry there are usually little bits of batter or breading that float to the bottom of the oil where our heat source is these pieces eventually burn and start smelling up the kitchen that's why they should be scooped out between batches of fried food ordering with Adams recipe for example the potatoes weren't boiled with vinegar so pieces fell apart while they were frying and became burnt when they weren't strained you can see his oil had large burnt chunks after using it if something is burnt like that in the kitchen I mean of that's going to smell but that could also happen if you burn food regardless of the cooking method now let's compare that to my fry oil these fries were boiled with vinegar which prevents pectin breakdown and even thin french fries like these aren't going to fall apart in the oil this means that I have perfectly clean oil with no burnt pieces and for something like chicken nuggets I take my mesh strainer through to remove the excess batter in between batches I'm not letting anything get burnt in fact when the oil is kept clean without burnt pieces I love the smell of freshly fried food in peanut oil and lard if you treat your oil right it will treat your kitchen smell right and as another side note if spatters do happen clean them up as soon as they happen letting that sit on your stove or the counter or the clothes aids in the smell so just have a towel ready to clean up the messes as they happen which is really a good habit to get into regardless of what or how you are cooking and unless you fry really often it's gonna get yucky hanging around the kitchen and I'm sorry I just throw it out this complaint has a simple solution for me deep frying oil is not wasteful on its own it's the user that is wasteful if kept clean like I was just saying frying oil can typically be used four to six times before it needs to be discarded skim it through a cheesecloth or a paper towel into a large mason jar and let it sit a dark place in the pantry it's not going to smell if the oil is clean the oil with burnt bits will for sure but not this one and it lasts a while too for example this oil that I'm straining is from my DoubleDown fried chicken video I use this same oil in my chicken nugget video a month later and these fried up absolutely perfect no rancid oil smell at all in summary my kitchen smells fine after frying in fact one hour after finishing filming my french fry video my buddy was standing in the kitchen and asked what I cooked today I asked him to guess and he didn't even know that it was something pride that just goes to show that the key is to keep the oil cleaned by skimming don't let anything get burnt and just clean it up as soon as you were done cooking and eating also as a side note I do want to say I made these french fries start to finish with a clean kitchen in about 70 minutes this is less time that it takes for Adams crispy oven fries which though they do look delicious still take the 15 to 20 minutes to boil then another 90 minutes in the oven and sure the deep fried ones have about 15 to 20 minutes more hands-on time but most of the time is still spent waiting on the boil and the fries to cool which is just the same as the oven recipe also you can still complete a full meal while deep fried I made burgers french fries a milkshake and filmed with two cameras doing everything by myself and having everything hot and ready to go all at once that being said I could see the allure of freeing up the burner with the oven fries I actually have a couple ideas of how I can approve that recipe to make it more efficient and tastier for my preferences so that's something you want to see let me know down below for me is someone who's shied away from deep-frying in my early cooking years probably like many of you it was just really because I didn't know how to do it or do it well but now what I've actually learned how to do it and set it up it's honestly one of my favorite cooking techniques and I would love to do it more but obviously it's just generally not recommended to eating chicken nuggets or fried chicken sandwiches with two pieces of fried chicken on them so hopefully anyone on the fence about trying out deep-fried at home this gave you a little little push in the right direction to give it a go got all those recipes mentioned in this video are all linked down below if you guys want to try them and again this isn't an attack on Adam or anything it's just I disagree with this video I want people to try as many different cooking techniques as possible in their home kitchen but that's gonna wrap it up for this one hopefully all enjoyed go try some deep frying I'll catch you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Ethan Chlebowski

Views: 529,534

Rating: 4.7364769 out of 5

Keywords: Cook with E, 4k Cooking videos, deep frying at home, adam ragusea, how to deep fry, deep frying, deep fried chicken, deep fry, deep frying dangerous, deep frying at home is a great idea, deep frying at home is a bad idea, french fries, fried chicken, chicken nuggets, fried chicken nuggets, deep fried french fries, crispy fries, ragusea, deep fryer, deep fryer recipes

Id: v2pCvV8Dn60

Length: 13min 3sec (783 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 07 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/aragusea]

Hey all, I left a reply on the vid.

[u/cooking_with_cas]

Honestly, "decent" seems like an understatement. Adam isn't right about everything - he really missed the mark on his thesis on deep frying.

[u/MyFishisBetter]

Decent counterargument yes.

However I feel that Adam's goal is to get people who wouldn't necessarily cook to start having more at home meal. Deep frying is no beginners task...

Also look at the guy's setup : big 6 round gas stove, full size baking tray (restaurant quality), big bowl...

Deep frying works well when you got a good setup with plenty of room like he has. Not really gonna get the same result in a cramped apartment kitchen...

But ya if you got room and you are confident go for it. Personally I don't think deep-frying should be praised to the masses as this easy peasy thing..

[u/Cheepy365]

I'm really curious for Adam's take on this video since hes recently gotten an upgraded kitchen and that deep frying video is nearly a year old coming this june 24th.

[u/Libertines18]

don’t like this guy. He has made a name for himself dissing people like Adam and Kenji

[u/a_random_person12345]

Deep frying is a good idea until you doctor tells you not to after a blood test :(

[u/Basomic]

THIS is the kind of internet conversation/argument/debate I want to see. Thoughtful, well-reasoned, organized, and most of all--civil, respectful, and polite! Great job to both of these guys (and this other guy just earned himself a new subscriber)