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