Deep Fry

Don't say we didn't warn you! Once you taste our batter-fried onion dippers, those blooming onions and onion rings you've always loved will seem so yesterday. These onion dippers may just be the best new invention since someone first thought to fry an onion.
By cutting the onion lengthwise into wedges and then separating them into layers, you end up with gracefully curved pieces. The finger-friendly dippers are battered and fried, transforming them into crisp, lacy-jacketed vehicles perfect for scooping up the sweet and tangy ketchup. Editor's Note: This recipe is part of Gourmet's Modern Menu for Summer Fair Favorites. Menu also includes Turkey Meatball Garlic Bread Heroes and Frozen Chocolate-Dipped Bananas with Peanut Brittle.

"[W]e seldom had enough coin to buy anything . . . well, except for a sausage now and again, or honeyfingers...do they have honeyfingers in the Seven Kingdoms, the kind they bake in Tyrosh?" —A Game of Thrones Roman Honeyfingers
This recipe is a curiosity. The honeyfingers fry to a crispy crunch on the outside while remaining a bit chewy on the inside. The pieces are easy to cut into shapes, and could probably even be rolled into logs. The flavor is really all about the honey, but the pepper and cinnamon on top, as well as the pine nuts, add a slight complexity. piper, nucleos, mel, rutam et passum teres, cum lacte et tracta coques. coagulum coque cum modicis ovis...ita ut durissimam pultem facias, deinde in patellam expandis. cum refrixerit, concidis quasi dulcia et frigis in oleo optimo. levas, perfundis mel, piper aspargis et inferes. melius feceris, si lac pro aqua miseris. —Apicus, 4th Century

These cinnamon-sugar dusted fritters are traditionally dunked in a cup of creamy hot chocolate—and who are we to argue with tradition?

This Mexican dish of tortilla chips smothered in chile sauce is just as good for dinner as it is for breakfast. If you don't want to make your own chips, substitute your favorite brand, but don't skimp on the garnishes; they add color and freshness.

In North India these legume wafers are called papad and are dry-roasted over a flame, but in the South they are deep-fried until they form lots of air bubbles and become light and puffy. They are sold in many flavors, but plain is preferred in Kerala. Pappadams are always part of a Sadhya: You crush one up and mix it together with rice, dhal, and ghee. The pappadam helps to bind all the ingredients together so you can form balls when eating with your hand. Store-bought wafers are used almost exclusively by Indian cooks because the traditional recipes are labor-intensive and require days of drying in the hot sun. This recipe is part of our menu for Sadhya, a South Indian feast.

It’s the crunchy contrast of hard shell and moist filling that does it for fans of fried tacos. Throughout the book are traditional and innovative fillings that make perfect partners to crispy fried tortillas. Try the take-out standard updated and refined as Classic Ground Beef with Guajillo Chiles (page 92), the smoky Tex-Mex allure of Barbecued Brisket (page 99), the fusion appeal of Thai Shrimp (page 59), or the unexpected meatiness of Portobello Mushrooms with Chipotle (page 24). These are just a few of the recipes that let you bring home the crunch without a trip to the drive-through. You can purchase ready-to-fill crispy corn taco shells at most grocery stores. As the shells can quickly get stale and go rancid, buy them at a store with a very high turnover and buy just the amount you need for a meal, as they don’t keep well. Of the national brands that I’ve tasted, those made by Taco Bell were the best and most reliable. With not much effort, though, you can make taco shells that are tastier, fresher, and crisper than any you can buy and in just the size you need. And you don’t even have to use tortillas. Wonton skins and egg roll wrappers, available at almost any supermarket, fry up into delicious shells ready for filling.

Plantains are cooked at all stages of ripeness, but for this recipe, they should be bought and used green for ease in slicing and frying. These chips are great for buffets and go well with tacos with seafood fillings.

These fried filled taco tubes are actually more Tex-Mex than Mex, but have become a popular Mexican street snack and restaurant favorite. Flautas (flutes) are larger, about the diameter of a cigar—about 4 to 5 inches long, and about 1 inch in diameter. Taquitos are smaller, more like a cigarillo—about 3 to 3 1/2 inches long and 1/2 to 3/4 inch in diameter. Both flautas and taquitos are great choices for entertaining. Serve either as finger food, figuring 2 to 3 per person as an appetizer, or include them as part of a main course combination plate. In Mexico, both flautas and taquitos are usually made with corn tortillas, rarely with flour. For taquitos especially, it’s very difficult to find flour tortillas thin enough to roll up into the proper tight little tubes and seal them securely. At the end of many of the recipes in the book is a feature called Tortillas that notes fillings that work well as flautas or taquitos. Among the many delicious choices are all-vegetable Squash Blossoms with Green Chiles and Cheese (page 23) or Wild Forest Mushrooms with Garlic (page 25) to meat-based Yucatán Chicken with Achiote (page 48), Turkey with Mole (page 52), Pork Carnitas (page 78), or Braised Beef Short Ribs (page 96). In general, the best fillings are cheese based as they hold together and cook evenly. Meat or chicken should be shredded, rather than in big chunks, which can take too long to heat up, causing the tortilla to overfry and burn.

When prepared properly, Japanese-style deep-fried vegetables are light and crisp and not at all greasy. Baking powder in the batter helps it to puff up in the hot oil, while cornstarch keeps it from being too dense (as it can be when made with all flour). Ice-cold batter is the secret to successful tempura, so be sure to use ice water (drained of ice). You can use any type of vegetable in this recipe, as long as you slice the vegetables thinly and uniformly so they cook evenly. Root vegetables should be sliced a bit thinner since they take longer to cook.

The secret to perfect fries—crisp on the outside and soft within—is to “fry” them twice, first to cook through, then to crisp and color. The first step is called blanching rather than deep-frying, since the temperature of the oil (300°F) is sufficient to soften, but not brown. (If you tried to cook them at a high temperature the whole time, the outsides would burn before the insides were cooked through.) The second step involves true deep-frying: the oil is brought up to 350°F—hot enough to quickly brown the outside without needing to cook the interior further. As with the sautéed rosti (page 329), the potatoes are soaked in water before cooking to remove excess starch, then dried thoroughly. Whenever deep-frying, remember that the oil should be maintained at the proper temperature, so you will need to adjust the heat as necessary. Unless you have a deep-fryer, use a cast-iron pot; it holds its heat better and distributes heat more evenly than other types. Also, frying can leave oil marks on stainless steel and other surfaces that are difficult to clean. To keep the temperature from dropping too much, add potatoes in batches; this will also ensure that they fry evenly and quickly. If the temperature spikes at any time, cool down the oil by adding some room-temperature oil to the pot. Be sure to salt the fries immediately after removing from the oil, when they are still piping hot. Any other seasonings (such as the lemon zest and rosemary below) are purely optional. Homemade mayonnaise (page 95) is an indulgent option for dipping. Or drizzle with malt vinegar for a tangy taste.

Deep frying works best for smaller pieces of fish (and chicken), since they will cook through before the crust has a chance to darken too much. Most any type of coating will do, but beer batter is favored for its puffy yet sturdy crust. The beer’s effervescence produces a lighter texture than those made with other liquids (such as buttermilk) and imparts subtle flavor, depending on the type of beer used (the dark beer used here will be more perceptible than lighter lagers). You can alter the flavor by whisking dried herbs (dill is great with fish), ground dried chiles, and other seasonings into the dry ingredients. This batter also makes a nice choice when coating shrimp, chicken tenders, and onion rings. Pair the fish with French fries (page 333) and serve with malt vinegar and salt for authentic pub-style fish and chips. Or make Baja-style tacos de pescado, or batter-fried fish tacos (page 276).

Think of this dessert as sweet, crunchy rice pudding–filled ravioli. It is composed of many elements, none of which are difficult to make and all of which, apart from the frying, can be prepared in advance. But you need to plan ahead and make the various elements in stages. To make the sauce, look for quality, plump raisins, such as flame raisins, a moist and flavorful variety that we find at our local farmers’ markets. We use cannoli dough in this recipe, which gets really crisp and blistered after it’s fried. We run the dough through a pasta sheeter, but if you don’t have one, you can roll the dough thin using a rolling pin on a lightly dusted surface. You will need a 3-inch square cookie cutter (preferably fluted) to make these.

Cannoli are one of the most widely known Italian desserts in this country, so naturally I wanted to find a way to include them in our repertoire. Traditional cannoli are tubes of fried pastry filled with ricotta cheese, and, often, bits of chocolate or dried fruit. When made right and served when the shells are still crisp, cannoli can be delicious, and when Dahlia came up with the idea of stuffing the shells with gelato, I knew she’d hit on something even better. They’re like little elegant ice cream cones where you get crunchy cone in every bite. We serve them three to a plate, each filled with a different gelato, with complementary dessert sauces and chopped nuts. Serving this kind of selection would be extremely challenging to do at home, but even one flavor of gelato and one type of dessert sauce will still make a really special presentation and a delicious dessert. The cannoli dough makes enough for four servings, but the dessert sauce our gelati and sorbetti recipes make are enough for exponentially more cannoli. So to serve a crowd, just double or quadruple the dough recipe. You will need a 3-inch square cookie cutter (preferably fluted) and small cannoli forms to make these. To get away with buying fewer forms, you can fry the cannoli shells in batches.

Everyone loves doughnuts, so it didn’t surprise me when these bombolini, Italian for “little doughnuts,” turned out to be the most popular dessert at the Osteria. You’re likely to find some version of sweet fried dough in every Italian region. That said, ours is made with a brioche-style dough that’s fried to order and served with a berry marmellata, or compote, and lemon curd—not at all Italian, but reminiscent of jelly doughnut combinations that Americans know and love. For the marmellata, we use mountain huckleberries from Oregon; you can use blueberries, blackberries, or boysenberries, or a combination—as you like.

Up until we opened Mozza I had eaten only meatless versions of arancine. Those I’d had were mostly in cichetti, the shoebox-size stand-up wine and stuzzichini bars in Venice, where cone-shaped versions are a staple, and in Sicily, where they’re much larger and round, like a tangerine. Both were made of plain risotto with cheese in the middle. In Rome, arancine are often called “suppli al telefono,” meaning telephone cords, because the ideal is that the cheese inside melts and stretches like an old-fashioned telephone cord. Matt and I worked hard to achieve that ideal and I think we did. I suggest you make these when you have leftover bolognese because, as good as they are, it would be a herculean effort to make bolognese for just the 1/2 cup you need to make these. Besides, that is what an Italian grandmother would do.

I have never met anyone who doesn’t like these squash blossoms. It would seem like it would be hard to go wrong, considering the combination of deep-fried batter and ricotta cheese, but I find that rarely do restaurants get the filling right. It took us a lot of tries to come up with ours, but luckily Matt and I both knew what we wanted and we both wanted the same thing, which was a light fluffy filling that also had a melting component, which is why we added mozzarella. We dip the blossoms in tempura batter because we like how light and crunchy tempura is. I try not to be brand-specific in my recipes, but in this case we recommend you use Mochiko rice flour, which you can find at conventional grocery stores, and which we think makes for the crispest finished product.

If you do not have a doughnut cutter, use a 3-inch cookie cutter to cut out the doughnuts and a 1-inch cookie cutter to cut out the centers.

These are best eaten slightly warm.