If you want flavorful ingredients, you may want to marinate or brine your ingredients before adding them to the batter or flour dredge. We covered brining and marinades in the Grilled foods chapter, but we will do a short recap to refresh your memory.
Marinading Recap:
- Marinading is fully submerging your ingredient into a seasoned mixture and letting it sit for some time to add flavor, remove unwanted smells, preserve moisture, and tenderize.
- You can marinate ingredients like chicken for frying in milk for 30 minutes overnight to tenderize and remove odor. Make sure to rinse and dry the ingredients before using them.
- You can marinade ingredients for frying in equal parts water and vinegar mixture to tenderize, remove odor, improve texture, and add flavor. Only soak your proteins in this mixture for a maximum of 30 minutes. After soaking, rinse and dry the ingredient before using them.
- Ingredients can be soaked in other marinades for 30 min – 24 hours. Make sure you drain away some liquid marinade before frying.
Brining Recap:
- Brining is soaking your lean protein (shrimp, lean pork, poultry, octopus) in a saltwater mixture to tenderize, enhance the natural flavor, and add moisture.
- Rule of thumb: 1 tbsp per 1 cup water for brine.
- Soak 1 hour per 1 pound of ingredient.
- After the protein is done brining, you can take it out of the brine and pat off the excess liquid with a paper towel before using it. You don’t need to wash the lean protein.
Season & Let Sit:
Season and sit this method is similar to curing but not the same. Basically, you add salt and pepper and let the ingredient sit with this for at least 30 minutes. This method is different from curing because you use less salt, you don’t need to use coarse salt, and you don’t need to remove it before cooking. Just season, massage the seasoning into the ingredient, let sit, then coat it in a dredge or batter.
Now let’s talk about an important part of prep before you deep fry.
If you want a crispy deep-fried ingredient, then you need to make sure the surface of the ingredient is dry. That is why we dredge, pat the ingredient dry after brining, and drain the marinade with a sieve before dredging and deep-frying.
Another aspect we need to consider for deep frying is the temperature of the ingredient before we fry. We need to make sure the ingredient is cold before deep frying. Use a cold marinade and let it drain from the ingredient in the fridge after it’s done before you deep fry. You can also place dredged ingredients in the fridge for a bit on a rack to cool well before deep frying. All these steps help to make a crisper surface.
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