Deepak learns to deep fry

Well, "learns" is a bit of a misnomer in the title because all I've learned is - oh wait a minute, I'm getting ahead of myself. I mean, there's no sense in telling you the punchline before I tell the joke, is there?

So anyway, waking up to the fact that I am soon going to be 42 and my irascible nature more or less precludes the possibility of finding a long-term partner, much less one who can cook, I decided I must learn to deep fry.

Why deep fry?

Well, I've learned to boil, make scrambled eggs (with milk and butter, no less) , poach eggs, boil and shallow fry sausages and a couple of other things. Of course, I can also make Maggi noodles and bung in the eggs and sausages. But I thought deep frying would be a cool new skill to learn.

So I approached the thing logically. The first thing one needs in order to deep fry is to have something TO fry, right? While my ambitious nature suggested that I go the raw meat route, the rational (ok as rational as I can get, which is pretty near insane but it'll do) side of me fortunately won and I picked up a packet of ready-to-cook chicken-garlic fingers.

When I got home I looked around for cooking oil and found that there was none. That should have been a given, actually, since I don't ever recall buying cooking oil on my own intiative. However, I was hoping there would be some left over from when mum was here. There wasn't.

So I sent mum an email asking which oil I should buy and whether they sell them in 250 ml packs (they don't). Since I was asking her anyway, I also asked how I should go about deep frying the fingers.

Mum's sage advice (after telling me which oil to buy) was, "ask the maid to demonstrate first."

Advice that I, of course, unsagely ignored.

Anyway, Sunday dawned and I decided that it was the day I was going to deep fry. I duly bought the oil and, come late evening, ventured into the kitchen to deep fry.

The tube light in the kitchen set up some kind of disco lighting effect, so I switched it off and lit a candle. Clever me.

The oil comes in a pouch (1 litre). Mum had advised me to pour it out into a bottle first. I duly located the bottle, set it up next to the candle, snipped off one corner of the pouch and upturned it over the bottle.

The oil overshot the mouth of the bottle and gutted the candle. In the dark, I suppose quite a bit of the oil got poured outside the bottle.

So I put the pouch carefully aside and got the emergency lamp. Better than the candle but it still left large pockets of the kitchen in shadow.

I picked up the pouch again and managed to get most of its contents into the bottle. The left over bit I poured into the round bottomed pan. If I'm calling it by the wrong name, too bad. It's a pan with a round bottom. Round bottomed pan.

Then I set the pan on the gas to heat up and took the chicken fingers out of the fridge. Opened the pack and got rid of the ice by washing the pieces. So far, so good.

Briefly wondered if I should thaw out the pieces first. Then I figured, the oil will be hot, so they'll thaw automatically. No idea if this is a good thing to do or not.

The oil began to smoke and I'd heard or read somewhere that it should not be doing that. So I lowered the flame, upon which it ceased to smoke. Clever me.

I put two of the fingers in and got hot oil on all of my fingers. The chicken fingers themselves behaved like a couple on honeymoon and clung to each other despite all efforts to separate them.

Now, mum had written that I was to turn the pieces over every now and then and fry them till they turned brown. Despite my best efforts to turn the little buggers over, they refused to turn. They rotated instead, behaving like a couple of lashed boats in a whirlpool. I could also not make out if they were light brown, golden brown or dark brown, on account of the emergency lamp choosing the inside of the pan to be one of the pockets of shadow.

So I fried them the best that I could and took them into the light to eat.

I took a bite out of the first one (I could finally see their colour and most were black). The outside tasted like charcoal (yes I HAVE tasted charcoal, it's an excellent tooth whitener). The inside was tough. Having heard horror stories of food poisoning brought on by eating undercooked chicken, I discarded the piece and went on to the next one. In all, there were nine pieces. I discarded four and swallowed down the rest.

This morning I faced the wrath of the maidservant who had to clean up the oily mess I had made on the cudappah stone of the kitchen counter. She said the oil had even flowed onto the doors of the storage section below the counter. I also spent the day in trepidation, wondering if I'd to have to go running to the loo suddenly at some point. Fortunately, that didn't happen.

I decided to go for a take-away meal of Prawn Masala and Steamed Rice for today, courtesy of the PGI Restaurant.

So what have I learned about deep frying? Get someone to demonstrate first and do it in the light.

Deepak