Frying mediums

[ChrisTaylor]

I've started my Larousse challenge--cooking through the book, making few concessions as possible--and one thing that's struck me, one thing where I am making concessions, is their choice of frying medium. I'm not a health Nazi. If it tastes good and I can say okay, I only eat this once a fortnight/month/year, I'll use whatever is suggested. I mean, I won't fry stuff in butter every day, but if I think it'll work for a particular dish, I'm not too fussed. Normal times, I use olive oil, largely because I prefer the smell to the stench of vegetable oil.

Larousse uses some, er, interesting frying mediums. Recipe #4 for me is the bacon omelette and they--the crazy bastards--fry bacon in butter. Is there any good reason for this? I mean, bacon surely only needs a tiny smear of oil--possibly not even that in a non-stick pan--as it generates its own grease. I'm worried, aside from the health aspect, that butter and bacon grease just wouldn't work together.

Too, there are still a lot of recipes that use lard as the frying medium. Is there any good reason for frying in lard? I've used lard when roasting potatoes--inferior to duck fat, but still okay--but I've never used it to, say, fry a steak. This, the 2009 edition, has clearly been updated in a lot of important ways, but the choice of frying mediums strikes me as one of the most obviously outdated aspects of the book. Are these frying mediums the norm for restaurants in France? Just as sometimes butter is the best frying medium, is lard ever the best? Are there situations when substituing it would detract noticeably from the dish?

[Chris Hennes]

Absolutely there are times when lard is the best: but here I'm talking about fresh-rendered lard, not that deodorized flavorless shelf-stable stuff on the shelves at your local supermarket. For example, many, if not most, Mexican recipes call for frying in lard, and in those where there are not a whole lot of other flavors you would not want to sub it out.

[JAZ]

One thing to keep in mind is that if you heat your cooking fat to the proper temperature when frying, your food really won't absorb much of it.

[andiesenji]

I still fry my chicken in lard. Ditto corn fritters and hushpuppies.

It has to be hot, as noted above, to keep the food from absorbing too much of the lard.

If done correctly the food will not absorb much at all.

[nakji]

Fuchsia Dunlop calls for lard as a frying medium in her "Revolutionary Cuisine: recipes from Hunan Province". Some of the lard does stay in the dishes: it tastes quite nice.

Obviously not something I indulge in regularly.

[Peter the eater]

My 1960's hand-me-down Larousse has often made me yelp "you crazy French bastards".

Is there any good reason for frying in lard?

Fresh pickerel from The Bay of Quinte, Ontario. Good lard makes clear bubbles and a well-battered fish golden.

[thirtyoneknots]

+1 for lard, it makes things crisp up like nothing else can. If I could, I'd never deep-fry in any other fat.

[bmdaniel]

Kenji Lopez-Alt actually had an interesting food myths post on serious eats where he discussed that the amount of oil absorbed is directly proportional to frying temperature (at least in the context of French fries), but that they seem less greasy the higher the temperature.

[vice]

Harold McGee's NYT column this week was on plant-based cooking oils. He heated samples of 15 oils in a pan by themselves. A tasting panel found that heat significantly degrades any initial flavor differences - all the oils were perceived as similar in taste after heating. It's an interesting result, but I wonder if a more realistic test might yield a different result. For instance, vegetables like eggplant and mushrooms can soak up quite a bit of oil when sauteed. Do differences in flavor survive the cooking process in such cases? While my gut says yes, my brain is skeptical that any vegetable could sufficiently insulate wicked-up oil to keep it below the temp at which flavor degrades (say the 350F mentioned in the article).