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Question about getting a crispy crust without a thermometer, my cheap trick from a diner cook in Tulsa
Everyone on here says you need a $100 thermometer or you are just guessing, and I flat out disagree. I worked fryers at a bar in Tulsa for two years, and our old cook Ray never used one. His trick was simple: drop a 1 inch cube of plain white bread in the oil. If it sinks and does nothing, the oil is too cold. If it turns golden in 60 seconds, you are good to go. If it goes dark in 15 seconds, kill the heat or you will burn everything. I tried this at home after I ruined a $14 batch of catfish last month because my oil was way hotter than I thought. The bread told me in seconds what my $25 thermometer kept failing to read right. Tried it again Sunday on chicken wings, perfect crust, no smoke alarm. So why does everybody here push the fancy gear when a slice of bread does the same job for 10 cents? I want to know if anyone else learned this old school way or if I am the only one still doing it.
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jamesm481mo ago
Did you ever think the bread trick also tells you something the thermometer can't, which is how the oil reacts to actual food? A thermometer reads the temp at the probe, but once you drop cold catfish or wings in there, the oil crashes and climbs back at different speeds depending on your pot and how much you dumped in. A thermometer gives you one number at one spot, while the bread shows you how the whole batch of oil is behaving right then. That's probably why Ray's method stuck around in busy kitchens where nobody had time to babysit a gadget.
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emmaallen1mo ago
Stuff like this pops up everywhere, where the cheap old trick works fine but people still want the fancy gadget. My grandma used the same bread test for decades and her fried chicken never killed anybody. Sometimes the simple thing just plain works and we forget that.
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