Apple Fritters

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Home Made Apple FrittersI first tasted an apple fritter as a young man in my hometown of Decatur, Illinois, at the Van Zetti Bakery. It’s been my favorite donut-adjacent food for fifty years since.

Recently, we ran across Kent Rollins’ YouTube channel, and I was delighted to find that he has a recipe. Despite my trepidation toward deep frying, I decided to try it out. We picked up a bag of Granny Smith apples and a bottle of Fireball Whiskey on Saturday, and made these on Sunday Morning.

The first step was to dice the apples and sauté them in a little butter. Once they start to get soft and a little golden, I added a couple tablespoons of Turbinado Sugar and a tablespoon of dark brown. Then came a teaspoon of ground cinnamon, and finally a good splash of Fireball to deglaze the iron skillet. This all got set aside to cool while making the batter.

I beat two medium eggs well to start the batter, incorporating 3/4 cup of sugar and a tablespoon of melted butter. The dry mixture (1 1/2 cups of all purpose flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt and a little grated nutmeg) went in next, along with 3/4 cup of Ginger Ale, as we didn’t have Mountain Dew on hand. By then the apples were cool enough to add, and the dough was ready for frying.

I used a little over an inch of vegetable oil in the bottom of a Dutch Over for frying, dropping in four large spoonfuls at a time once the oil was hot. The recipe made about a dozen and a half fritters, and they were just the right size for an individual serving – although everyone ate more than one.

The glaze was a cup of powdered sugar and a few teaspoons of Fireball, with a little more of the Ginger Ale to get the right consistency.

You can watch the whole process on Kent’s YouTube video. The recipe is here.

These were as delicious as I had imagined and hoped, and the frying was a lot less daunting and messy than I had feared. It’s the cowboy way. 🙂

 

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Fathers’ Day 2018

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Another Attempt at Chicken-Fried Steak

We had the pleasure of another Fathers’ Day with Grampy, and took the occasion to make another attempt at Chicken-Fried Steak.

As mentioned earlier, I became obsessed with this dish after a visit to Horseshoe Hill Cafe in Ft. Worth. This is the fourth time I’ve cooked it in the past couple months, and it was the best batch yet. I used bottom round steaks this time, which had the flavor and slight chewiness that you want. In addition to the beef, I breaded a batch of chicken breasts which turned out really good too. I managed to keep the peanut oil at 350°F in the cast iron Dutch Oven throughout the cook, and finally got a process in place to move from breading to frying to draining to holding in the oven as efficiently as possible. As always, the black pepper gravy was excellent.

Mrs. Noe made the mashed potatoes and steamed some broccoli with lemon butter, and she and Aunt Pat also pulled together a lovely green salad. I grilled some green onions with nice fat bulbs that I’d found at the Kankakee Farmers’ Market on Saturday. We also served some spicy pickled okra. Aunt Pat brought a delicious cherry pie and some soft serve from DQ for dessert.

One of the other little pleasures of the day was serving this meal on the plates that were used for Sunday Dinners at Claudia’s grandma’s. They’re a blue Currier & Ives pattern and, coincidentally, the same as the ones my mother had when I was growing up. So they hit the perfect nostalgic notes for both of us.

The ladies drank a nice California Rosé from F. Stephen Millier. I stuck with Shiners. My toast to Grampy for Fathers’ Day was “Here’s to us, and them like us. Damned few of us left.”

You can find the recipe for Grady Spears’ CFS at Texas Monthly. It calls for “round steak” but there are a lot of cuts that qualify. My best luck was with these bottom rounds, but some of that may have been more experience with prep and cooking. You could also use sirloin, eye of round or top round. Some will need more time with the mallet than others.

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First Run at Chicken-Fried Steak

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I spent some time in Texas recently at a conference for work, and on our last night there we ate at Horseshoe Hill in Fort Worth. It’s owned by Chef Grady Spears, and specializes in chicken-fried steak. In Texas, chicken-fried steak is a religion, and Spears is the high priest.

Prior to that night I had only had CFS as a sandwich patty from food service at the hospital where I volunteered as a teenager. It had been deep fried from frozen, I suspect, and tasted about like you would imagine. I had always enjoyed hand-made versions of CFS’ little sibling, the breaded pork tenderloin, over the years, and figured Spears’ offering would be sort of the beef equivalent. I had no idea that it would be a revelation.

Chicken-Fried Steak at HHThe meal, from start to finish, was amazing. Several of us around the table enjoyed appetizers, including some incredible fried okra and Rocky Mountain Oysters (hard pass from me on those). There was also plenty of cold Shiner Bock consumed.

I ordered my entrée “The Cowboy Way,” served with mashed potatoes, black pepper gravy and a grilled green onion. The very first fork full set my taste buds spinning. For such simple ingredients, the taste was dumbfounding. With the crunchy, golden crust, rich and slightly toothsome beef, and that silky gravy with the peppery bite – it was easy to understand why Chef Spears’ version of this classic has become its undisputed standard.

I am a large man with a huge appetite, and I found it impossible to finish the gargantuan portion in one sitting. Luckily the Marriott where we were lodged provided a small refrigerator in the room, and my breakfast plan for the next morning. 🙂

Friends at Horseshoe Hill

Some of the group opted for dessert. I couldn’t eat another bite, but was tempted by another Southern classic, banana pudding.

Off and on during the evening, a handsome man with a warm smile wearing a ballcap, a neatly-trimmed beard and an untucked shirt would pop into the room, quickly attend something, and then disappear. My boss, Stena, referred to him as “random guy.” As we were leaving, he came in again, fussed with something briefly, laughed and nodded at Stena’s greeting, and then followed us out to take a group photo. We realized only later that he was Chef Spears, which is sort of like not realizing until later that Nolan Ryan was taking your picture outside Arlington Stadium. He was friendly, unassuming and gracious.

In the week since my return from the trip, the memory of that meal has become an obsession. I was able to find Chef Spears’ recipe on the Texas Monthly site, and decided to do my best to replicate it at home. The prospects were a bit daunting, since I very rarely fry anything. Sauté, yes, but not fry. So I looked at this as an opportunity to add another skill to my culinary bag of tricks.

For a first attempt, it didn’t turn out badly. The gravy was perfect. Claudia loved the grilled onions, remarking that they reminded her of onion rings. The flavor of the steaks was incredible. I think that the cuts (top sirloin pan steaks) could have used just a bit more of the mallet. It’s not that they were tough, but some bites were on the chewy side of toothsome.

The breading is where I could really use some work. My guess is that I didn’t get the temperature of the oil quite right. The first steak I cooked was fairly blackened, so I pulled back the heat and must have overcompensated. The ones we ate had a little too much saturation for my taste.

If I were independently wealthy, I would be on the phone trying to contact the chef right now, begging him to let me come work in his establishment and watch what they do for a few weeks. As it is, I’ll have to be content to experiment with more breaded-and-fried things until I figure out how to do it right.

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