1954 calories and 134 grams of fat
August 10, 2019 4:04 AM   Subscribe

 
That's basically how I always pictured them being made.

I'm glad it's a process that is normal and easy to deduce from the end result and not something arcane and horrifying when revealed.
posted by hippybear at 5:18 AM on August 10, 2019 [2 favorites]


Huh. So that's basically onion rings in their natural form, still attached to the onion ring plant. Neat. Now I want one.
posted by Vesihiisi at 5:28 AM on August 10, 2019 [9 favorites]


Right? This just makes me want (some fraction of) one. Mmm, fried batter-covered vegetables.
posted by quaking fajita at 5:50 AM on August 10, 2019


What if vegetable, but calories?
posted by biscotti at 6:19 AM on August 10, 2019 [7 favorites]


I am kind of freaked out by the enormous trough of hot fat though. Kind of like the Suez canal but the boat floats on the oil rather than carries it... I've seen donut kitchens with that kind of thing. I always wonder: how the fuck do you clean it?
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:21 AM on August 10, 2019 [1 favorite]


After a long night at Mardi Gras in.....'98? '99? A friend and I stumbled back into the apartment where we were staying, incredibly drunk and hungry. We found the kitchen gadget to make blooming onions, and an onion, and oil! We're in business!

Heat up the oil, slice the onion, it goes into the oil, we wait, and wait, and wait, and finally it's ready. We let it cool off, and by that time we were so exhausted and hungry we just started devouring it. It wasn't great. It tasted like hot, oily onion.

"Hey Chris," I said between bites, "were we supposed to batter this before it went in the oil?"

"Well, shit," he replied, and we finished it and passed out.
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 6:22 AM on August 10, 2019 [31 favorites]


Metafilter: It wasn't great. It tasted like hot, oily onion.
posted by Nat "King" Cole Porter Wagoner at 7:28 AM on August 10, 2019 [11 favorites]


how the fuck do you clean it?

You let it cool at the end of the day, drain the oil out, scrub it down, replace the oil with new. The better your eating establishment the more frequent the oil is changed. Ever had nasty burnt tasting fries? Old oil.
posted by Mitheral at 12:21 PM on August 10, 2019 [1 favorite]


Love the L-shape fryer. You can put a couple or three people on it for continuous assembly line production when it gets busy but also allows it to be run by one person when things are slow.
posted by zengargoyle at 2:08 PM on August 10, 2019 [1 favorite]


I like how forceful all of the actions are, like they're pissed at the onion.
posted by gaybobbie at 6:09 PM on August 10, 2019 [3 favorites]


.... Clean it?
posted by webmutant at 7:31 PM on August 10, 2019 [1 favorite]


But just what's in the slurry?
(it's people, isn't it? don't tell me it's people)
posted by Mchelly at 7:44 PM on August 10, 2019


Also, is that some special kind of onion? I don't think I've ever seen onions that large.
posted by Vesihiisi at 10:55 PM on August 10, 2019


The Center for Science in the Public Interest, the organization that revealed that a medium sized movie popcorn is equivalent to about a dozen Big Macs once ranked the Bloomin Onion as the absolute worst-for-you food item in the world, outranking even Fetuccine Alfredo, which came in at about 54 Big Macs, if I remember correctly.
posted by thirdring at 10:58 PM on August 10, 2019


You let it cool at the end of the day, drain the oil out, scrub it down, replace the oil with new.

Agreed. Although at a restaurant I worked at as a short order cook, we used these huge multi-gallon fryers. When it was time to change the oil, the person in charge of the process would keep a pint or so of the old oil to add to the new. That pint of old oil was a small percentage of total oil volume in a multi-gallon fryer so it wasn't a significant amount compared to the new. It was explained to me that this was to prevent the horror of fully cooked but totally white fries. Or golden brown but seriously overcooked fries. Something about the little bit of old oil kept the coloration of the fried food at optimal levels.

I did notice this working at KFC as well. The original recipe pressure fryers were on a timer so you really couldn't cook the chicken longer even if you wanted to. New oil made for a really light, undercooked look until you got a couple of batches through the new oil. I always wondered why the Colonel didn't save a bit of the old oil too.

At the time (30 years ago), the KFC pressure fryers would go through a filtering process every couple of batches which would pull out the bigger chunks of batter that fell off in the cooking process. We would harvest that every day and use it to help flavor the gravy. The gravy was mediocre at best but without the crispy bits from the fryer, it was truly horrifying.
posted by ensign_ricky at 6:36 AM on August 11, 2019 [1 favorite]


The Center for Science in the Public Interest, the organization that revealed that a medium sized movie popcorn is equivalent to about a dozen Big Macs once ranked the Bloomin Onion as the absolute worst-for-you food item in the world, outranking even Fetuccine Alfredo, which came in at about 54 Big Macs, if I remember correctly.

I think maybe you don't, or they were a performance art group making a cute but fraudulent claim. Because a dozen big macs are about the same number of calories as two pounds of fat. And I don't believe that you get two pound of fat with a medium movie popcorn, or nine pounds of fat with an order of fetuccine. Fat is pretty much the most calorie-dense food, if I remember correctly.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 5:39 PM on August 11, 2019


CSPI: ‘Two Thumbs Down’ for Movie Theater Popcorn
It's hard to picture someone mindlessly ingesting three McDonald's Quarter Pounders with 12 pats of butter while watching a movie. But according to new laboratory analyses commissioned by the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest, that food is nutritionally comparable to what you’d find in a medium popcorn and soda combo at Regal, the country’s biggest movie theater chain: 1,610 calories and three days’ worth—60 grams—of saturated fat.
(This is not an endorsement of the CSPI.)
posted by Lexica at 6:24 PM on August 11, 2019


It's hard to picture someone mindlessly ingesting three McDonald's Quarter Pounders with 12 pats of butter while watching a movie

Well, what movie is it?
posted by thelonius at 6:27 PM on August 11, 2019 [7 favorites]


Having that huge volume of oil is a wonderful heatsink for keeping the overall temperature constant as a cold battered flowered onion is going to have a pretty big thermal mass. The results are going to be less good in a lower volume of oil - so difficult to achieve great results at home.

In highschool int he early '90s, I worked at a NYF (supposedly "New York Fries") and iirc we had three different fryers at different temperatures and different residency times. The first one cooks the inside of the fries and brings up the temperature, the second cooks the outside, and would sit and drain until someone made an order, then it would go into the last highest temp fryer get get golden and crispy.

Don't know about now, but back in the day, there was no need to order "no salt" - each order served was made in the last few minutes at most. We'd also entertain "extra crispy" requests (and much less frequently "softer" or "lighter" but that usually resulted in a complaint and we'd always ask if they really wanted that).

We'd move the first vat's oil into the second, and the second into the third. It depended on sales volume, but we'd fill that first vat with fresh crisco daily or at least every other day.

One time I somehow got my forearm seared to the edge of a oil-hot grate while cleaning a vat; it stuck to my arm and ripped a strip of skin off of me as gravity did its work. Had a scar that persisted a little over a decade.

We also cut fries at least a couple of times a day from an entire case of whole potatoes into a huge 200L bucket on wheels and fill with water to prevent oxidation. There was a lever operated whole potato slicer bolted to the stainless steel cutting table.

Every so often, you'd reach into the cardboard crate and grab the next potato - only for your fingers to sink into a goopy smelly mass of bacteria and digested potato held together by the skin like a big vegan pus bag. (we'd wash the outsides of the rest of the crate of potatoes individually before cutting them.

I really miss their "california" seasoning salt. Too much of it. On an extra crispy poutine at the end of the day. With real cheese curds. The gravy was from a bag, but it was decent - beefy and not too salty.

I don't miss those pair of black jeans that turned perpetually waterproof within 5 shifts of working there.

Don't go within an hour of opening (or more for a slow shop, and slow shops don't make create great product); the fries may have sat in water in that 200L bucket overnight.
posted by porpoise at 8:26 PM on August 11, 2019 [1 favorite]


Let us not forget that the attention-seeking scaremongers at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) were largely responsible for bullying McDonald's and other fast-food restaurants into switching TO trans fats in the late 1980s. They have a lot to answer for.
posted by Umami Dearest at 11:23 PM on August 11, 2019


the organization that revealed that a medium sized movie popcorn is equivalent to about a dozen Big Macs

That's not really what they revealed, and yeah, CSPI isn't exactly the most trustworthy org. in the world.

Without butter, a medium sized movie popcorn is just over 100 calories. Fetuccine Alfredo isn't great for you, especially depending on where and how it's prepared, but the assertion that it is in any way nutritionally comparable to 54 Big Macs is patently absurd. That isn't how nutrition or calories work.

Bloomin' Onions are bad for you and kinda stupid, but there's no need for FUD or bad science reporting.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:54 AM on August 13, 2019 [1 favorite]


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