If you do it well, if you, in fact, do it to perfection beyond which there is no possibility of improvement on the concept of “fried dough”, the name for it is sopaipillas.
Done correctly, sopaipillas are puffy clouds of fried dough, almost light enough to float off your plate, thinner than paper, airy, dry, exquisite. You bite off one end and pour honey into them.
(and then, of course, you eat them. lather, rinse, repeat)
I’ve made them to a modest degree of success (have had considerably better at excellent Northern New Mexican restaurants) with very hot animal lard in a very deep cast iron frying pan, biscuit-style dough rolled out very thin with (again) animal lard not Crisco to mix with the flour, toss 'em in and spoon hot oil over the topsides of them as they balloon out.
Mine still aren’t as airy as the best of them. They should sort of crumble away and disappear, leaving you with taste but no sense of having anything substantial in your mouth, as you try to eat them. Each sopaipilla should weigh 0.01 milligram when you hold it in your palm. It should be golden with deeper brown highlights.
If you do it well, if you, in fact, do it to perfection beyond which there is no possibility of improvement on the concept of “fried dough”, the name for it is sopaipillas.
Done correctly, sopaipillas are puffy clouds of fried dough, almost light enough to float off your plate, thinner than paper, airy, dry, exquisite. You bite off one end and pour honey into them.
(and then, of course, you eat them. lather, rinse, repeat)
I’ve made them to a modest degree of success (have had considerably better at excellent Northern New Mexican restaurants) with very hot animal lard in a very deep cast iron frying pan, biscuit-style dough rolled out very thin with (again) animal lard not Crisco to mix with the flour, toss 'em in and spoon hot oil over the topsides of them as they balloon out.
Mine still aren’t as airy as the best of them. They should sort of crumble away and disappear, leaving you with taste but no sense of having anything substantial in your mouth, as you try to eat them. Each sopaipilla should weigh 0.01 milligram when you hold it in your palm. It should be golden with deeper brown highlights.
Awww, dammit, I re-opened the entire @%#@ thread in another window to make sure it hadn’t gone through before I clicked "send"again, after getting a message that ‘newreply’ had not gone through.
Oh Man, pizza fritta! Haven’t had some in years. Grandmom used to make them with the leftover dough[used to make pizza on Saturday night] we were sent to buy at a local bakery[this was years before frozen supermarket bread dough was available, and home bread-baking was not part of our family tradition] Fairly small rectangular pieces of dough were flattened, slashed 3 times[ONLY 3 times] and deep fried. Served with a sprinkling of salt. Good eats them was. As for elephant ears, when I visited a county fair in Indiana years ago, they made them but were called Tiger’s Ears[to honor a local school mascot] Delish with cinnamon sugar on 'em.
Yeah – I grew up in New England, and usually you could get them with pizza sauce and pamesan OR butter with cinnamon and sugar.
Down here, you just get them with cinnamon and sugar.
That link that Kat posted had a nice picture. I think of “fried dough” and “elephant ears” as the same thing. Funnel cakes would be something different.
I’ve heard a few people call these Elephant Ears. They’re also called Palmiers, which are a puff pastry cookie. Baked, not fried. Pain in the ass to make, but excellent with a scoop of ice cream!
When I was a small child, my mother would make a loaf of bread at night, but not bake it. She would leave it in the oven overnight to rise. In the morning, she would rip chunks off of the loaf, form it into disks about the size and thickness of a hockey puck, and drop them into a pan full of boiling-hot oil. We’d cut them open, and put butter and jelly on them. We called them grease cakes. It didn’t occur to me until I was older that this was a very unappetizing name for a spectacularly yummy breakfast! In fact, the only time during my first pregnancy that I actually puked was after a breakfast of grease cakes and orange juice. I’m not sure if it was the third grease cake that did me in, or the third glass of orange juice!
Me and my friends were having a deep friday party (indeed, a deep fry party on friday) and deep frying everything we could find in batter. Candy bars, fruits, meats, whatever. Eventually we got tired and lazy but still had a ton of batter, so we just dumped a lot of batter into the oil.
After a few minutes, out came what was somewhat like an elephant ear but much thicker and crispier. We put some hot sauce on it and sliced it up like a pie. Oh man was it great.
I lived between Brockett and Standoffm and bannock is a whole different thing, to me. It’s cooked over a fire on a stick, not fried. I know some other places it’s made differently.
We called them “fritters”. Fritters, to us, were either bread dough fried in oil; or they were “corn fritters”, which were made of Bisquick (or however you spell it) with corn mixed in and fried in oil. Hush puppies are made of cornbread.
When I was a kid, my dad taught for Indian Affairs & we lived on 2 reserves - the Peigan & Blood reserves (Brockett & St. Mary’s).
Bannock can be done over a camp fire on a stick, but most commonly natives make it in a frying pan at home using oil - since you can’t just light a camp fire in the house.
They still call it bannock when it is made in a frying pan as per fried dough.
Can I come to your house? My daughter and I once killed time waiting for a concert to start by imagining what foods would and wouldn’t taste better deep fried. Tuna fish sandwich? Yes. Pizza? Of course. Peanut butter cups? Sign me up! Spaghetti? Well, yeah if you do it right. She suggested an evening such as the one you described above. It’s not the fear of fat ingestion or the scary hot oil that keeps me from trying–it’s the fry smell sticking to the house for days.
And to keep this from being a total hijack: we call it fried dough or doughboys. Sprinkled with powdered sugar and the tiniest bit of cinnamon. Tastes like a giant crispy doughnut. Funnel cakes look yummy but different (never had one), and I’ve never heard of elephant ears.
Sure. With my latest project, I’ve been trying to offend all that is good about food and make a deep fried salad. Some sort of hollowed out head of lettuce with salad ingredients, battered, deep fried, and served in chunks. We’re working out the details.
