Can You Deep Fry in Salt? How This Historic Methodology Works

There’s one thing magical about watching an ingredient go right into a deep fryer. Listening to the oil sizzle and seeing dough puff or batter flip golden brown in a matter of seconds is a reminder of how enchanting cooking could be. 

If the transformative, fast-acting strategy of frying meals in oil is thrilling for you too, then there’s an much more visually intriguing cooking technique that can instantly seize your consideration: frying in salt.

When cooking creator Roice Bethel (@roicebethel) shared a clip of himself cooking chips and popcorn in a pan filled with salt this spring, the video shortly amassed over 15 million views. It’s satisfying to observe: popcorn kernels are submerged in plain salt, then seconds later begin to puff into the snack you understand and love. 

Stunned followers chimed in with a myriad of questions — fairly a number of of them requested for Bethel to strive frying hen in salt — and one commenter even talked about that “I’ve my culinary diploma, and I didn’t know you may deep fry in salt.”

This cooking technique does work simply because it seems to be within the viral clip, but it surely wasn’t invented by Bethel. As an alternative, frying in salt — or extra typically, sand — is a course of with historic roots that spans international locations and centuries.

How does scorching salt frying work?

When deep frying in oil, the fats surrounding the meals is what transfers warmth, cooking the submerged elements. Within the strategy of scorching salt frying, you’re merely changing oil with salt, which may evenly distribute warmth on all sides of the meals. Scorching sand frying is the same approach that depends on the identical warmth switch system, however replaces salt with sand.

Identical to you may take a look at the temperature of oil earlier than frying, you’ll discover that Bethel makes use of a thermometer to gauge if the salt in his pan is at a excessive sufficient temperature for cooking. 

You may solely scorching salt fry in the identical varieties of vessels used for deep frying in oil. For instance, you may scorching salt fry in a cast-iron skillet or carbon metal wok, however you shouldn’t use a Teflon-coated nonstick skillet. The salt will get highly regarded and may harm a synthetic nonstick floor or burn you when you contact it.

A food-grade, coarse salt is greatest for this system — finer seasonings like desk salt will probably be troublesome to sift off the elements you cook dinner, and coarse granules are much less more likely to soak up moisture. Other than that, one house cook dinner explains on Reddit that “one can use any salt; simply let it warmth for quarter-hour to let the unstable compounds evaporate (like iodine). Identical goes with sand as effectively.”

Most significantly, solely utterly dry gadgets ought to be fried in salt. Any damp ingredient, like hen or steak, will trigger the salt to stay, leading to a dish that’s too salty, and the salt is not going to successfully make moist elements, akin to batter, turn out to be crispy.

The place does scorching salt frying come from?

Though there isn’t a lot details about scorching salt or scorching sand frying on-line, it’s clear this can be a approach that has been round for a whole bunch of years and continues to be used at this time, particularly by road distributors throughout a number of international locations in Asia, together with Bangladesh, Nepal, China, and India. 

Kurush F. Dalal, an archaeologist and culinary anthropologist, explains that “sand frying is what is finished throughout India… Indians even make popcorn on the streets this manner. It’s generally used throughout Northern India in winters to roast candy potatoes. It’s extremely cost-effective and a really controllable course of.”

Dalal notes that “Historically, in many of the world salt was too valuable a commodity to deal with so casually,” emphasizing that frying in sand is what you might be much more more likely to see in India.

Frying in salt is extra budget-friendly than frying in oil, and frying in sand is cheaper than both choice. You too can reuse sand or salt many extra occasions than you reuse cooking oil, and cleansing up after cooking with these supplies is far less complicated.

Fryums — colourful, puffed chips typically comprised of potato starch — are one of many different elements you would possibly see distributors in India frying in sand or sometimes salt. In China, chestnuts have traditionally been fried in woks filled with sand throughout winter, and distributors in Bangladesh typically toast peanuts in pans of scorching, black sand.

For those who’re desperate to strive scorching salt or sand frying your self, I like to recommend beginning with one thing many distributors cook dinner with this system and also you seemingly have already got in your pantry: popcorn.