Kurt + Amy's Very Special Holiday Deep Fry Christmas Special

Nothing says Christmas quite like warm, homemade cookies fresh out of the... deep fryer? Join us on our bold journey to create a deep-fried Christmas cookie. Will we revolutionize the world of holiday baking? Or fall face first in a dough of our own making? There's only one way to find out. Special guest stars Marina and Charlie Brown lend a hand!

Forgive us... it's a montage

If the preposterously clumsy doughnut-making sequence was not enough to quench your fry party thirst, then we invite you to feast your eyes on this montage of frymania. Obama had just won the election, and we were on top of the world. And when you think you're invincible, well, sometimes bad things happen [to fall into your deep fryer]. So here is the highlight reel, also known as the blooper reel.

Viewer discretion is advised.

The Doughnuts and Friends Show

A recent deep fry party provided the perfect opportunity to debut homemade doughnuts. Doughnuts (or Olde Tymey Doff-Ghnouts, as we've created) aren't the kind of things you just stumble home drunk one night and fall into. It's the sort of thing you plan well in advance to get drunk and do. Believe it or not, this was our first attempt at doughnuts, and they came out pretty f'ing great. The key is the oil temp (375) and not over-mixing the batter. Other than that it's just a matter of getting the batter off your fingers and into the oil in a usable shape, which you can practice time after delicious time.

Props to Amy on the title sequence. And the Communist Party t-shirt. Next up: theme song. Reader submissions will promptly be thrown away. This post is kind of a complete shit show, I think half the video is me looking for baking soda. Spoiler alert: I found it. I'm going to put a poll up later to see who enjoyed the glamor shot of me eating raw doughnut batter off of my fingers.

Mac & Cheese

Part of our mission in creating a deep fry blog is to offer creative options for reheating your leftovers, and to that end we bring you deep fried mac and cheese. We know what you're thinking: mac and cheese is already so delicious and decadent in its natural state, why deep fry it? Well, for one thing deep frying is exponentially better than microwaving your leftovers. We used Paula Deen's recipe for The Lady's Mac & Cheese (her words, for the love of god, her words; not ours), but substituted the more robust cavatappi pasta for elbow macaroni. We sliced our leftover mac and cheese into squares and coated them in flour, egg, and breadcrumbs: the deepfryer's holy trinity. The end result is a crispy, creamy, cheesy delight.

I have to give even madder props to Amy. I'm blown away by the even sweeter title sequence. Someone's getting comfortable with iMovie. Sorry for the lame and pointy intro in the video. I was really...um, punchy. I'd like to go over a few more points from the video that I wish I could've expressed a little more cogently. First, the appropriate recipe. Don't feel you need to recreate Ms. Deen's concoction, but disregard anything made by the Kraft Corporation, and kindly unhand the Velveeta. I've never tried deep frying either of these types of Mac & Squeeze, but I would presume that they goop up real good and have a hard time staying together. Thanks to our dedicated Italy Consultant Marina for the interesting (and inaudible) tidbit on Cavatappi. And 349 is not in fact a multiple of 7 (unless the thermostat starts at -1). Luckily there isn't a math prerequisite for deep frying. I don't in fact know what system of numbers leads my deep fryer to think 347 degrees is an appropriate increment. I think it's a Fibonacci Sequence or the digits of pi.

Finally, let me address my controversial plea for America to buy deep fryers with sincere apologies. What is in that glass? But in all seriousness, people say to me "I would weigh 300 pounds if I had one of those," but it's not necessarily true. First, as I said, some healthy recipes just call for poaching or frying in oil. You can of course try this in a pan and guess as to the proper temperature with unpredictable results, then throw away that expensive oil when you're done. It's far more economical, however, to use an instrument that takes the guesswork out and allows you to reuse your frying medium. And let's face it, unless you're running an international Ponzi scheme, you probably don't need to be spending a small fortune on oils. And if you're worried about gaining weight, just don't use it too often. I only use it for a regular meal a few times a month (but when I do need it, nothing else will do), and only for late night snacking every few weeks or so.

Impromptu Frying: Sweet Potato Fries & Plantains

After an eventful night of bocce playing, jukebox stuffing, and cheap beer drinking at a local bar, Amy and I dropped by a convenience store to pick up some crap to deep fry. We settled on a sweet potatoes and a plantain. All these require is a deep fryer (check) and the desire to see things submerged in hot oil (check).

Sweet potato fries are a staple of deep-frying. To start you'll want to heat your oil to 375 degrees. Peel your potato and cut it into slices of approximately a quarter-inch and gently lower into the hot oil. You'll know they're done when they're nicely browned and crisp. We seasoned our sweet potato fries with salt, cayenne pepper and cajun seasoning. Then we whipped up a simple garlic-mayo dipping sauce by adding garlic powder, basil flakes and lemon juice to the mayo, and a honey-Dijon.

Plantains are an equally simple but tasty late-night fried treat. Just be sure to chose a ripe plantain. For the plantains, we lowered the oil temperature to 325. You can season your plantains savory, but we chose to sweeten ours with a sprinkle of granulated sugar and a drizzle of chocolate syrup.

Then it's time to sit back, enjoy the deep-fried fruits of your labor, and take in a few episodes of classic Saved By the Bell -- but not before remembering the most important part of deep-frying: turning off your fryer dummy.

Inaugural Post

Welcome to Kurt and Amy Deep Fry Savory, Hearty, Impromptu Treats. The idea behind putting this blog together was to:

a) Demistify the deep frying process
b) Share the many years of joy that deep frying stuff has brought us
c) Try to open up the social aspect of cooking in a way that we strongly relate to

In NYC where we live, bars are open until 4am, which by and large is enough time to socialize with one's contemporaries, but we've all spent time in less enlightened locales whose various puritanical blue laws, set forth by the misguided moral vanguard can restrict one's ability to cavort until the heart's content. God help you should you, for example, live in Massachusetts. (Amy's note: or Connecticut).

So if you and your friends are forced to evacuate at last call before you're done drinking, odds are one of you will be hungry. Maybe you've got a 7-11 or Store 24 nearby, or a crappy pizza place; the kind of pizza place that's open at 2am serving the kind of pizza that's still around at 2am, but it's worth noting that you're just a few simple ingredients, some leftovers, and some know-how away from keeping the party going. And a deep fryer. You'll need a deep fryer. But we'll cover that later. In the time it takes your heating element to raise the temperature of 1/2 gallon of vegetable oil to 350 degrees, you can enjoy a hot, savory snack that's roughly 3.5x more delicious than comparable items cooked via conventional methods* and enjoy relatively little cleanup the next morning.

The plan here is to provide simple recipes for deep fried foods using ingredients that are either easy to find late at night, or include items the average person would already have on hand, and document some of our deep frying exploits to provide helpful and informal (read: mildly intoxicated) videos to edutain.

*increase by a factor of 10 over microwave cooking