Deep fat: an introduction.

Okay so I don’t know what y’alls grandmas were like, but mine were/are pretty hard. My mom’s mom used to chop ice out of a pond with an axe, wearing socks for gloves, and shoot deer in the head with a .22 rifle. She used to, and still does to some degree, make some truly unhealthy dishes. My dad’s mom taught me to make wine when I was six. Her parents were moonshiners. She as well had some dishes that could make a man’s heart explode.

One thing that both ladies’ cooking has in common is something that’s fallen out of favor in the home, recently: deep fat frying. Unless your grandparents were WWII-age or older, you probably weren’t exposed to much of it as a kid. Let me say right now: That’s a damn shame. So a kid has a few doughnuts fried in lard, you kick him out to play in the woods for six hours. he ain’t gettin’ fat. Unless he’s the fat kid in the group already.

Food fried in fat ain’t exactly awesome for your body. But, if you only eat it once in a while, and keep up a reasonable level activity, your heart probably isn’t going to give out at 30 or whatever. Just walk around a little extra. Or be a farmer.

Some people dig on molecular gastronomy, with all kind of foams and fogs and shit and man, if that makes you happy, fire up your immersion blender and go to town. I prefer the philosophical opposite, though: cooking simple, delicious food the way old people did. It’s rewarding! And it tastes good, usually. Also you only need like four ingredients and a cast-iron pan.

Today we’re gonna cook one of my favourite treats from when I was a kid: Rabbit Ear cookies. I remember getting a brown paper bag of them from my grandmother on easter when I was maybe seven or eight. The bottom half of the bag was almost translucent from the grease, and good lord, were they delicious. I’m assuming that most of you have never deep-fried anything, so don’t get insulted if you know all about deep-frying and I’m like “Okay be careful about the hot oil, because basically even the smallest mistake will end in a pretty horrible disaster.”

So let me say right now: Be careful about the hot oil, because basically even the smallest mistake will end in a pretty horrible disaster.

Deep-frying is messy, so the best solution is to think outside the house and do this shit in the yard. I use a propane-fueled camp stove, because it can crank out the BTUs, and it’s pretty easy to hold at a constant temperature. Don’t bother if you have some kind of whisper-lyte gnomette 1000 backpacking stove, because we need a shitload of heat. Constant heat is the key to frying. You gotta hold your oil at around 350 degrees for quite some time, and a stove the size of a snuff can is gonna have a hard time with a cast-iron skillet and a pound and a half of melted crisco.

Now a cast-iron skillet isn’t necessary, but it really helps keep your oil at a consistent temperature. If you don’t have a cast-Iron skillet, then what the hell man, go get a Lodge 12” at the hardware store. They’re like $25 and made in the USA, and they come basically pre-seasoned. Or look around in a thrift store. Today I used a heavy-bottomed stainless steel pan that I bought at goodwill for two bucks. It has a little higher sides than my skillet, and it holds heat okay. What I am saying here is that you gotta have a hefty pan. If you want your fried stuff to be light and crispy, you gotta cook it hard and fast, and that means you gotta keep your oil HOT AS HELL.

To make sure you got your stuff at a good temperature, you should have a candy thermometer. It will tell you when your oil is ready to rock. They ain’t expensive and will really help you get a feel for when you got your stuff hot enough, without tipping over in to OH GOD WHY IS THERE SO MUCH SMOKE territory.

Cooking outside has the added advantage of not making your house reek of delicious grease, and lessens the possibility of dying in flames. Both good things.

So what the hell IS a rabbit ear? Well, it’s a chunk of fried dough, twisted around some to form a crude V-shape, fried, and rolled in powdered sugar. Think of a cross between a cruller and a funnel cake, with just a little more body and crunch. The best part is, it only has like eight ingredients that you probably already have. The things you will need, are:

3 1/2 cups flour
2 teaspoons salt
1 egg
between a quarter and a half-teaspoon of baking POWDER. baking soda will not work.
1 tablespoon clarified butter (melt some butter. wait for the white shit to drop to the bottom. use the clear yellow stuff.)
3/4 cup milk (you might need like a tablespoon more if your dough is too crumbly.)
A big tub of crisco or whatever vegetable shortening is cheapest. (not butter flavoured, it should be waxy and white. You can also use lard if you are so inclined)
powdered sugar

Get all the dry things. Mix all the dry things together really well. Add the wet things. Knead the resulting dough until there are no dry bits and the texture is pretty uniform. Like I said, you might need to add juuuuuust a touch more milk and/or clarified butter. I did both. Warm up the milk before you pour it in so it doesn’t mess with the butter. Form the dough in to a ball and let it sit for an hour, then roll it out on a floured surface until it is a little thinner than pie crust, like 1/16-1/8”, or about 2-3mm. I found that it was easier to roll if you split the dough in to halves and rolled each one out separately. It should be thinner than your average pie crust, but not so thin it’s all coming apart.

Now get at that dough with a knife, and cut it in to strips between 3/4 and 1” wide and 4-6” long. Pinch the middle of the dough together about the long axis, and then fold the two halves together to make a crude bunny-ears shape. You ain’t got to do this, but it makes them easy to flip, and just frying ripped pieces of dough makes it look like you didn’t even try. WHAT WILL THE CHILDREN THINK???????

Get your crisco up to 350F. You want a good two inches of liquid in the pan, enough to cover the pieces you drop in by a good margin. Save some scraps of dough, and drop one in when the oil gets close. If it at first sinks and pretty quickly then rises to the surface to fry, your oil should be good. This is a way to test if you ain’t got a thermometer.

Toss some of those suckers in to the oil, baby! And by that I mean gently drop them in. You only want to fry like five or six at a time, so you don’t cool your oil off too much. Let them go until the edges turn golden brown and the color starts to move towards the middle, then flip them. It should only take like 30 seconds or so, and less on the second side. The only way to get good at this is to practice, and develop a feel for what’s perfectly crispy, what’s undercooked, and what’s just hideously burned. Remove the ears from the oil with a slotted METAL spoon, and lay them on a plate with a couple paper towels on it to soak up some of the grease. Let the oil heat back up some before you toss in your next batch.

Once everything is all fried and delicious, and your ears have cooled off a bit, put some powdered sugar in a ziplock bag or tupperware or whatever with you got on hand. Put in a few ears and shake them like a baby that JUST WON’T SHUT UP FOR ONE SECOND WHILE DADDY TALKS TO THE BANK. Repeat until all the ears are done. You can add cinnamon or some shit if you want.

So there you have it! Deep-fried desserts 101. Next time you go to the fair and some dude wants to charge you like six bucks for a funnel cake, just be all “HELL no!” and make some golden-fried treats at home.

The best thing about this dish, besides everything about the way it tastes, is how simple and cheap it is. You can afford to mess this one up a couple times without breaking the bank. If shit goes south halfway through, toss the whole mess, crack a beer, and start again. My grandma would be proud.

Here are some pictures.

This is what it looks like when you melt a half-tub of crisco.