Let’s say that you are in a hurry. You have to cook 100 kg of pork rinds and you don’t have so much time. You look at your kitchen and see your good’old pressure cooker. You fill it up with a few cups of oil, add the pork rinds, close the lid and put it on the stove. What happens next? Perfect fast pork rinds? Big Cablam?
100 kg? As in 220 lbs?
Wow.
This thread at eGullet mentions that a pressure cooker is not a pressure fryer.
From a quick look through, this is not something to try.
Can a domestic stove get hot enough to boil the oil at all? This suggests soybean oilboils at around 300 degrees C. A gas stove could reach that temperature, but I’m not sure about electric stoves.
I am pretty sure I have been cooking my food at lower temperatures… Like 170 C.
IIRC, Col. Harlan Sanders used pressure cookers full of oil instead of water back in the 50s and 60s when he first started up Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Electric stoves can melt aluminum, so, yes.
From that thread
Here’s an article about it. It was rather dangerous and Sanders had to train new franchisees on how to do it.
I would love to see the results of this disaster. Mythbusters!
Sneak a peak at the machines at a KFC - those are massive chunks of steel with serious clamp-down covers.
Home pressure cookers operate at 6 psi - with water, that is somewhere around 156F.
Heating oil to 6psi gets you some serious temps.
In the early 70’s, a whole bunch or people put a clamp on the top of their pressure cookers and called them “Pressure Fryers”. Disasters ensued.
Never put more than 2 Tablespoons of oil in a pressure cooker.
I looked this stuff up ten - 15 years ago. Sorry, no cites - but I’m sure the info is still out there.
Why on earth would you want to deep-fry anything, besides your worst enemy, at 300 C? It would make the surface a charred mess, while the inner parts were still raw!
I do a fair bit of cooking for myself, and I still have some scars on my hand and forearm to remind me to never, ever put a solid lid on a deep-frying pot. The reason: water vapor will condense on the inside of the lid, and as soon as you touch it to remove it, drops of water will fall into the oil, with, in hindsight, predictable results. Nowadays, I use the kind of lid made of a mesh of thin wire - it allows the water vapor to escape, while still, mostly, preventing oil splattering.
180 C is pretty much optimal for deep-frying, and is easily obtained with an open pot on an electric stove. Doubling the recipe doesn’t call for a doubling of temperature!
Cooking pork rinds involves driving off moisture from them - I don’t think a pressure cooker vent will be sufficient to allow it to escape - if significant moisture stays in the system, that’s going to continue to boil and create pressure after the pan is removed from the heat source - by the time this has finished (i.e when the oil has cooled to below the boiling point of water), the pork rinds will be ruined.
Alternatively, attempting to remove the lid while there is still superheated water in the system seems almost guaranteed to end very badly.
Confirmed. I worked at a KFC restaurant for a short time in the early 1990s. As an aside, the kitchen of a KFC restaurant is the greasiest location in the universe.
Anyway, they used an open-air fryer for the extra-crispy recipe, but the original-recipe chicken was fried under pressure. They actually had two fryers. One was a little fryer used for small batches: you lowered the trays of chicken in by hand and closed/opened the pressure lid by hand. The other fryer was a monstrous industrial machine with enough rack space to fry 20 “heads” (one “head” = the parts from a single bird) and was much more automated. At the start, the lid of the pressure chamber (maybe 3’ x 2’) was up, and you loaded the trays of breaded chicken onto arms that hung down from it. When ready, you pushed a button, and it lowered the lid/chicken into a vat of hot oil, and sealed the lid against the tub. I don’t recall the pressure they used, but it couldn’t have been much; 3’x2’ works out to 864 square inches, so (for example) a pressure of just 3 psi would have required a clamping force of 2600 pounds.
I think the intent was not to allow the oil to get hotter, but to prevent the water in the chicken from turning to steam quite so rapidly, keeping the outer layers and breading moist long enough to cook the inner layers completely.
To answer the OP’s question:
using a home pressure cooker as a pressurized deep fryer is not a good idea. When a PC is filled with water, the temperature is controlled by the pressure relief valve: the water boils at a temperature that is determined by the pressure set via that valve, and so the cooker will not get hotter than that, no matter what you set the burner to. If your pressure cooker is filled with oil instead, the oil can be heated to ludicrous temperatures - not particularly because of the pressure, but because you won’t have a thermometer in it and so you’ll have absolutely no idea what temperature it’s at. Heating large volumes of oil to its boiling point (which is what will probably happen) is a Very Bad Idea.
Unless, as Artemis_Tardis says, you’re Mythbusters. I’d love to see them tackle this one - but it’s probably too obscure.
Celsius, surely? 156 F isn’t even boiling point.
Water boils at around 170 degrees F at 6 psi. But 6 psi is considerably less than atmospheric pressure, so a pressure cooker is unlikely to be using it. According to Wikipedia, pressure cookers reach temperatures of more like 250 F.
That’s 6 psi over atmospheric.
AKA 6 psig (not 6 psia).
What is 6 psi over atmospheric? Certainly not the pressure at which water will boil at around 170 degrees Fahrenheit.