my greatest culinary failure

On February 8 this year, in an effort to use up the apples and pears gifted to me by my company, I chopped a bunch of fruit up to make apple fritters. And it all went to hell. What's funny is that everything was crunchy and good the moment I took the fritters out of the oil... but when they all cooled down, the fritters proved to be soggy, greasy, and disgusting. I wondered how I'd rescue or reconstitute them at the office, or whether I should bring them to the office at all. I decided to let them sit in the open overnight, hoping against hope that they might dry up and get less soggy, but oil doesn't evaporate, and the fritters were even nastier to the touch in the morning.

I took the fritters to the office and decided to pan-fry them with just a tiny bit of oil. Because the fritters were so large, such a fry didn't really heat up their insides. Result: the outsides blackened a bit on the pan, and the insides were greasy and cold. I had handed one "refried" fritter each to my boss and to my Korean coworker. When I tasted the fritter I'd prepped for myself, I immediately went to my boss and asked for his fritter back. I also asked my Korean coworker to give his fritter back, but he insisted that he wanted to taste it anyway. I said it would be nasty and greasy, and that the pan-frying had burned the fritter, but he was an annoyingly stubborn bastard and kept his dish. Later on, he remarked that the fritter was too greasy and had burned bits—exactly the things I'd warned him about, the fucking idiot. Some people just gotta learn the hard way.

They don't look too awful coming out of the oil.

Still sizzling.

So, what did I learn from this experience? A few things.

Mistake 1. Using Asian pears alongside apples meant that the fritters would render out way more water than if I had just used apples: Asian pears are naturally watery. Next time, I'll cube the pears up and bake them low and slow for a few hours to dehydrate them somewhat. Or I'll fry them in my bokkeum-pan to coax the water out quickly.

Mistake 2. When deep-fried things become greasy, it's usually because the oil's temperature isn't high enough for the fry. Now, I did check my oil's temp: ideally, it should've been around 375ºF, but my oil was actually higher: 390ºF when I started ladling the fritter batter into it. Good, I thought. I assume what happened next was that the batter cooled the oil way, way down; I should probably have let the fritters fry a minute or so longer.

Mistake 3. I made the batter from a trusted source's recipe, but with one major change: I used chickpea flour instead of eggs (1 egg = 1/4 cup chickpea flour + 1/4 cup water). I could have gone to my building's grocery and gotten myself some real eggs, and that might have made a huge difference, but it was nighttime, and I was lazy. (In my defense: the website that suggested the egg replacement did claim that chickpea flour was fine for fritters.)

Mistake 4. Related to mistakes 1 and 2: I had cut the apples and pears into large, bite-sized cubes (see above), which doubtless created a surface-area-to-volume problem, with the water inside the Asian pears being unable to escape fast enough while the fritters were frying. Next time, I'll cube everything smaller, and as I said above, I'll dehydrate the pears before adding them to the batter.

There were probably other mistakes as well, but the above mistakes were the most memorable. I can comfort myself by noting that a lot of Koreans, when they make those twisty ggwabaegi doughnuts, end up with a greasy mess that they then toss in coarse sugar and sell to the public with no shame, no sense of pride. In my experience, most ggwabaegi are pretty shitty; it's a red-letter day when I find a place that makes them right. (Your own mileage may vary.)

Another thing is to get the right confectioner's sugar. All I had on hand, to make a glaze, was confectioner's erythritol, which turned out to be horrible thanks to that weird "cooling" effect. By the time I wanted to toss my fritters in a sugar-cinnamon mix, though, I could already tell they were hellaciously greasy. Next time, I'll get real confectioner's sugar and do it right. My boss apparently grew up with apple fritters, so he's impatient to try some. I wish the local doughnut places made them, but I don't think Krispy Creme and Dunkin Donuts do so, except perhaps occasionally/seasonally.

So that's the story of my culinary disaster—easily the biggest fail ever. I was so ashamed of the results that I yanked my fritter back from my boss once I realized the pan-frying hadn't worked; I wish I could have spared my coworker the misery of eating his fritter, but he was a stubborn asshole, so he got his instant karma.

I might try fritters again later to use up the last of my fruit (I have one apple and one pear left) and apply the lessons I've learned. We'll see.