Wired blogged about this mini deep-fryer last week, and at first I was quite taken with it. Who wouldn't want a small, easy-to-store deep-fryer that uses only a quart of oil rather than a gallon or more? But then I remembered the deep-fryer episode of Good Eats, in which I seem to recall Alton Brown talking about heat recovery—that you need a good amount of oil so that the food, when dunked, doesn't lower the oil temp so far that your goodies don't fry properly. Then again, if you're only making a single serving of fries or one chicken wing at a time, I suppose this thing might work. Still, if cooking for one is sometimes lonely, deep-frying for one...
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Good morning! Can't you just hear the roosters and smell the ... hay? What's that? Waffles would smell better? VillaWare FarmYard Waffler, $36.75, from Amazon...
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The food blog Umami Mart takes George Foreman's Lean Mean Fat-Spinning Deep-Frying Machine for a test drive and comes away with a perplexingly mixed review. After cooking three different fried foods—mandoo, french fries, and mozzarella sticks—the author says two of the three were "too dry" and "too baked" tasting and describes the thing as ugly and "overly complicated, huge and heavy." Still, she recommends the thing. Wha? The Foreman fryer's supposed advantage over others is that it uses centrifugal force to spin out or "knock out" the fat after frying. It claims to remove up to 55 percent of the fat absorbed during frying. Which just means that people will buy it and feel justified in eating 55 percent more...
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