The best way to fry chips in beef dripping is to triple cook them. The best way to do this is to blanch the chips in salted water until they’re just cooked, for starters. Then drain them, and dry them very well. Heat up the dripping in your fryer to a hundred and twenty degrees celsius, and fry the chips for drive minutes.
You certainly can! Using beef dripping is considered, by a large number of people, to be one of the best ways to make chips. The flavor is something else – slightly sweet but with a gently meaty aftertaste. A delicious flavor, especially for when you’re in the mood for a truly indulgent meal.
There’s no reason that you cannot use beef dripping in a deep fat fryer, in fact, a number of places do. Make sure that your deep fat fryer has a reliable thermostat, and you’re good to go!
Remove them from the hot oil, and then dry them again, leaving them to cool and chill. When you’re ready to serve. Heat the fat to 160˚C, and fry the chips until they’re crispy and a beautiful golden-brown color.
The blanching step is included because potato is a very absorbent ingredient. By blanching you’re allowing the potato to suck up some water, which will later turn to steam to give you a deliciously fluffy inside to the chips that you’re making. This will be complemented by the outrageously crispy outside that the beef dripping and deep frying will get you.
If you’re not crazy about the blanching step then you can leave it out, but you’ll need to extend the first frying time to eight to ten minutes – this will ensure the chips are entirely cooked.
Is It Safe To Use Beef Dripping In A Deep Fat Fryer?
It is! The thing that makes certain fats more or less safe to use in a deep fat fryer is their smoke point. All oils have a smoke point – this is the point at which something within the oil begins to burn, leading to the production of smoke.
The reason that butter, for example, would be unsuitable for deep frying is that it has a very low smoke point. When it reaches that temperature, the milk solids in the butter will begin to burn, leading to a burned taste and a kitchen full of acrid smoke – having a smoke in your kitchen is dangerous, to say the least.
As a general rule of thumb, deep frying is best when done at roughly 180˚C. Of course, this changes depending on what you’re cooking, but most temperatures are between 170˚C and 190˚C. If you go too low with the temperature, then it will soak into your food. If you go too high, then you’ll burn the food before it’s done.
Therefore, the best way to go is to pick an oil that has a smoke point above the temperature that you’ll be cooking at. Beef dripping, for example, has a smoke point of roughly 210˚C, meaning that you’ll be safely cooking below that without any worries at all.
The Advantages Of Using Beef Dripping In A Deep Fat Fryer
Flavor
The flavor of beef dripping and food cooked within it is quite unique. It is both sweet and a little meaty and is the reason why beef dripping is favored by a number of different places around the world. For example, fish and chip shops in the UK traditionally always used beef dripping because of its uniquely tasty flavor.
Waste Reduction
Beef dripping is, at a fundamental level, a waste product. It is produced by taking all the pieces of the cow which are left after being butchered and then rendering the fat out of them. This collected fat is beef dripping and can be used in a number of ways.
This means that the fat is not flushed away anywhere where it might post harm to the environment, and is instead being used for something.
The Disadvantages Of Using Beef Dripping In a Deep Fat Fryer
Unhealthy
Using dripping is considered to be tastier than using vegetable oils, but it’s also quite a lot less healthy. As a rule of thumb, animal fats contain a large number of fatty acids which can negatively affect your cholesterol, leading to problems in later life. While a large amount of vegetable oil can have a similar effect, the problem is less bad gram for gram.
Odor
The smell of beef dripping, while often considered to be lovely, is very ‘sticky’, like the smell of a lot of fats. This means that if you were to cook with beef dripping in your home, your whole house may start to smell like beef dripping for quite a while afterward.
While this can be negated by increasing ventilation and closing doors to odor-sensitive parts of the home, it is still a problem to be aware of.
Hi all! I’m Cora Benson, and I’ve been blogging about food, recipes and things that happen in my kitchen since 2019.