Deep Fried Foods of the British Commonwealth

Before you start gufawing at/locking this thread, I should note that it is being created at the admin's request. This is for serious discussion of ridiculously fatty foods only.

Apparently there's a great deal of latent opinion in many forum members on the various deep-fried foodstuffs avalible in The UK and its former possesions. I suppose that even the US would be included in that second category, so that pretty much opens this thread to anyone who wants to discuss the deep-fried food habits in their home country. So, flame away!

After all, this is the the Spaceflight Cafe. With a name like that, there ought to be a good place to get a bite to eat.

Deep fried pineapple rings are nice (they keep most of their texture) but I'm not as keen on deep fried bananas because they go a bit squishy.

Does a deep-fried pizza also counts?

guffaw, guffaw
How much will it cost (guffaw) to develop a 0 G deep fryer?
guffaw

Deep fried pineapple... covered in sugar

Bananas should be frozen and chocolate covered man.. they are not so good oily. Pineapple chunks are also good frozen and covered in chocolate.

you're making me hungry.

It'd actually be rather easy: simply suspend a blob of oil inside a glass sphere. Insert a submersible heating element until the oil is sufficiently hot, then push the subject (be it chicken, pineapples, doughnuts, SPAM, etc., slowly through the oil. An interesting side-effect of being in free-fall is that the food won't have the tendency to bob to the upper surface (like doughnuts do) -- there's no upper surface to bob to.

Sidenote: there is a small trend here in the US towards fried insects as a delicacy, although this seems to be mainly seen in the North (dumb Yankees don't have enough sense to kill bugs -- they try to eat 'em) and especially on the southern West Coast (Well... it's California. What more can I say?). The prospects of this trend lasting an extended period of time are pretty grim, though.

Sounds good to me. You should write up a proposal for a space shuttle experiment.

Glad to see this thread has been such a hit

Whatever it costs, it should be of the utmost priority. We must carry our civilization's heights of gourmet cookery with us to the stars. It is our race's destiny to find and deep fry tasty edibles on worlds not yet even dreamed of.

YUM!

--Ralph

Spacecowboy wrote:


Listen, I'm a professional chef, and I am interested in this idea. I think this is doable, but it would take some getting used to. Firstly because I think you're going to need some airlock type aperture for inserting and removing the product, a lot bigger deal than just dropping it in. Furthermore, stuff floating to the surface is how we tell that things are done. I guess it being made out of glass offsets this somewhat, but you're also looking through the oil, which with usage gets progressively darker. Also, how do you manipulate the product while it's in the oil? How would you skim off the crumbs after doing something like fried chicken?

So many questions... I'm gonna lose sleep over this

Are you people nuts? Nobody in the UK can tolerate food that has a taste as exciting as pineapple or banana. We like it bland and stodgy like our religion. The culinary iconaclasm was the defining moment in British civilisation. It reminds us every day that we will remain aloof and unhappy until the day when death comes as a blessed relief.

Give me batter pudding with syrup...the ultimate in stodge!

You'd certainly need some sort of door, otherwise you'd end up with hot oil all over your galley. Which, incidentally, is what I meant to finish saying (I knew I shouldn't have stopped with "push it through"). The same goes with "manipulating the product": have it on a rotisserie-like armature that slowly and gently shoves it through the oil blob. As far as cleaning the oil, use some sort of "oil scrubber" in the same way that life support systems use an air scrubber. I'm not sure how it would work, or even if that's the best solution (probably not), but it's all I can come up with right now -- other than sucking all the used oil out and injecting new oil in.

You will definitely need to handle smoke and splatter. The hot oil can smoke quite a bit so you need fume scrubbers. And furious bubbling and splattering starts as soon as the raw food enters the hot oil. That will need to be contained in 0 G.
Look how serious I am getting!

I'm not sure that the bubbling and splattering would really occur that much: remember, there's no gravity to make steam "rise". For all we know, boiling a pot of water in space could be extremely dangerous, with the hot water simply exploding as soon as one bubble forms.

Has NASA done any research on this kind of thing? I'm sure they have, what with all their "living in space" experiments, but I've never looked for it.