melting your mouth

For this week’s Whisk Wednesdays post, it’s the last in our series on frying and sauteing, and it forced me to finally conquer my fear of deep frying. I almost backed out on this one. I’ve never tried deep frying, as I don’t have a fryer or a splatter screen or anything, and I’ve been sure I would splash hot oil all over myself and get a terrible burn. So I’m pretty proud of myself for trying this one — and pretty pleased with how it turned out. These were really delicious, and definitely worth making again!

We made these on a weeknight, so I wasn’t able to take my usual mise-en-place pictures. But here’s a summary of what we did. The shrimp were first marinated in olive oil, lemon juice, parsley, and salt and pepper. This definitely gave them more flavor than they would’ve if they were directly battered and fried. While the shrimp marinated, I made the batter. It included equal parts all purpose and potato flour (1 1/4 c each) and 1 T baking powder, combined with 3 T olive oil, salt, and 1 c cold water. These were combined, drizzled with oil to keep a crust from forming, and let rest for a while as the shrimp continued to marinate.

Right before getting ready to fry, I folded 3 beaten egg whites into the batter (which was more like dough until adding the egg whites). I think these helped to really lighten up the coating on the shrimp. The shrimp were then dipped in the batter and deep fried in 350 F oil.

I don’t know if it was the lightened batter, or the marinade, or what, but these came out deliciously crispy but not too greasy, despite all that oil. It reminded me a little bit of a tempura batter, especially since it seemed to kind of puff up as the shrimp cooked. In fact, since we had a bunch of extra batter, I ended up frying everything I could think of — some potato slices left over from the delicious potato pizza we had made again, and some mushrooms. The vegetables were almost as good as the shrimp. Overall, I’m really glad I decided to tackle deep frying — this cookbook curriculum is really teaching me new and useful skills, and getting me outside my comfort zone, in a good way!

Be sure to check out how the rest of the Whisk Wednesdays group fared — on the blogroll on the right. (Note: I’m a couple weeks behind, so if you check them out, they’re probably making something other than these shrimp.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Appetizers, Fish, Whisk Wednesdays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.