The Temptation of Frying

Few years ago GlobalPost’s list nominated ‘World’s 10 Fattest Countries’ based on a statistic by World Health Organization. Depicted in the article the obese ‘eat until they can’t breathe’. ‘World’s 10 Fattest Countries’ respectively: American Samoa, Kiribati , United States, Germany, Egypt, Bosnia and Herzegovina, New Zealand, Israel, Croatia, and the United Kingdom. The phenomenon rooted in the love of frying food culture.

Kiribati and the British love fried fish, chip and crisp; German adore fried hoof and fried sausage; Egyptians and Israelis coincidentally prefer fried potato balls and United States is the godfather of frying culture, with inventing the absolute vicious Coca Cola to pair up the frying products.

In America, all you have to do is to turn on the TV and there will be cooking programs floating around teaching people how to make Fish Taco, which is a golden crispy fish fillet glazed with oil, sizzling in a tacos wrap burst with shredded vegetables and salad sauce.  American obese are all salivated by this scene.

A very few people are able to be rational about frying products.  None of which treat frying food as an abreaction of appetence or a traditionally method to reuse stale ingredients instead of subliming them onto art realm, but only Japan does. Frying is definitely not a traditional cookery derived from Japan, it however brought in by a Japanese chef on a Portuguese merchantman in Edo period. The reputable Tempura (天ぷら) is a behalf of Japanese frying cookery in which the frying process does not aiming at flavor enhancing but to lock the freshness. Whist the rest of the world fry food in order to reuse stale ingredients, Japan does the opposite – precisely for highlighting the freshness of the ingredients. The theory of Japanese frying focus on the thinness of the deep-fried coating so that the sleek shrimp on the inside could be translucently visible through the coating.   If you attempt to use paper to soak up the oil of a Tempura it is bounded to be unnecessary because the deep-fried coating is never allowed to spill with oil.  This is how we should respect frying food.

By Jennifer Chan