LAT: “Fair Food: Deep Fried and Guilt-Free. Well, Almost.”
Normally, I like LA Times reporter Jeannine Stein’s work. But if today’s article, “Fair Food: Deep Fried and Guilt-Free. Well, Almost,” is any indication, I don’t like her taste(s) in food. Seriously, reading it almost made me nauseous.
I ate deep-fried butter at the Orange County Fair. And I’m not apologizing for it.
Let’s face it — going to a county fair is like getting a free pass to junk food land. All bets are off, and no one gives you the admonishing finger if you follow a platter-size funnel cake with a deep-fried Oreo chaser. In fact, while carrying around the deep-fried butter I was bestowed admiring glances from other fair-goers. You have to love a place that offers something called a “Coronary Combo” of deep-fried butter and chocolate covered bacon.
…While eating the kabobs we shared a table with a young couple who generously offered us some of their fried Kool-Aid. Like our taste test of the fried butter, they were curious about what this bizarre-sounding delicacy had to offer. Balls of fried donut-like dough revealed a hot pink interior that tasted like Kool-Aid and had a fizzy tang to it. Not something I’d go back for.
With an hour to go until closing time we figured we’d throw caution to the wind and try one more thing. I lobbied for the cheesecake on a stick, but my husband convinced me that the deep-fried Snickers bar would be a better choice. It wasn’t bad — I liked the hot, melted chocolate — but by that time the whole fried dough thing was becoming overwhelming.
“Becoming overwhelming?” Thanks to my history, I was overwhelmed just reading about it.
Y’see, once upon a time, back in my old college daze, I worked as a restaurant cook. I started working at a 24-hour coffee shop (Eppie’s) and later “graduated” to a hotel/restaurant/catering position (the Capitol Plaza Holiday Inn). Needless to state, in my short career behind the line, I deep-fat fried a LOT of food… ranging from the ubiquitous french fries and onion rings to pre-fab servings of chicken kiev. I also cleaned a lot of fryolaters… at the end of every shift, the grease would have to be removed and either strained or replaced; while the unit itself was cleaned out (this would be done one unit at a time, so as not to interfere with orders as they came in).
Gentle readers, draining and straining several gallons of hot, malodorous grease at a time was not a happy experience (I’d just as soon scrub toilets). But it was certainly an enlightening one, since I got to see what happened to the grease over the course of its lifetime.
Commercial grease has a “lifetime?” Yep: fresh fryolater grease was golden-yellow and quite clear (once it melted, that is). Interestingly enough, it also wasn’t very good for frying light-colored foods like french fries – they had to be cooked much longer than usual, just to achieve a faint “cooked” color around the edges. Pale grease made for pale fries. Fries only started looking “right” after the grease had been “conditioned” by cooking several successive batches of food.
Conditioned grease wasn’t a clear, golden color anymore. It was brown… like the color of lightly steeped earl grey tea, and slightly opaque. It turned brown, thanks to the simple sugars and proteins (leached from previous batches of food during cooking) that had polymerized and/or undergone oxidation reactions in the high heat. And it was this polymerized crud that was responsible for most of the lovely brown color on the fries.
Yum! Naturally, the grease had to be changed when it became too dark (coffee-colored) and opaque – otherwise the food would look over-fried before it was completely cooked through. This was the worst grease to change, too, since it was hot and smelly and invariably contained lumps of twisted, charred-black food debris.
Can you say “La Brea Tar Pits?” Blecch!
This is why greasy, deep fried fair food has no intrinsic appeal to me. Such food is deep-fried, yes, but hardly guilt-free… and not solely due to the added fat, either. It’s the added old-food-crud that seals the deal for me.
August 10, 2011
I’m all for the occasional indulgence of food. That being said, “fair food”, like she sampled, would not be on my list. I normally don’t eat deep fried anything.
I know what you saying about the oil. I am also pretty sure the vendors at the fair don’t spend a great deal of time worrying about changing the oil in their fryers!