"fritters" news and stories

Happy National Fritters Day!

To clarify, a fritter is any chopped food (or occasionally whole pieces of an ingredient) combined with or dipped in batter before being fried. The dish can be both savory or sweet, and, in the U.S., most frequently involves crab, apples, or corn. The Greeks and Romans made similarly fried nibbles, until stateside versions first appeared on the American market in 18th and 19th century, with recipes typically involving a duo of cornmeal and fried fish.

Varied renditions of fritters appear internationally, from the French beignet aux pommes (apple fritter), the Indian spiced vegetable pakoras, sweet Italian Zeppole, to the beloved bite of the American South, hush puppies. Celebrate with your preferred version today!

What is your favorite type of fritter? Argue your case in the comments!

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The long weekend's over, you're back on the job, and maybe you need some comfort food to take the edge off. Our suggestion, via blogger (cup)cake eater, is to treat yourself to a good old country breakfast, and put a batch of fluffy maple corn fritters on the griddle. Comfort food is the star in Joni Marie Newman's vegan cookbook Cozy Inside, and you can check out her fritters recipe here.

Want more corn? It's the height of the season, and we're going to be featuring corn for the rest of the week in recipes that take it off the cob and into a chowder, a relish, and some very spicy muffins.

Become a member of the Slashfood Flickr pool for a shot of having your photos featured in Feast Your Eyes.

Corn and tomato salsas. Photo: sporkist, Flickr.

• With just-picked farmers' market ingredients, the Salsa Lady makes sinfully spicy salsas.
• After a class-action lawsuit was filed against Dannon for overstating Activia and DanActive health benefits, the company reached a settlement.
• The Star Tribune thinks a warm September is perfect pinot grigio weather, and suggests Scaranto Delle Venezie Pinot Grigio 2007.
• Warming up the cool fall kitchen with fresh corn fritters.
• Is there such a thing as wine that works for everyone?
• Minneapolis has the largest group of Hmong people in the U.S., but their ethnic food is still underground.
• In metro dining news, Chambers gets a new look and tasty new menu, Loring Kitchen & Bar gives great views of Loring Park, and OM Restaurant dishes up fresh and complex Indian food.
• Weekly restaurant pick: Lyndale Ave's Prima.

This potato fritter looks, in our humble opinion, exactly as a potato fritter should.

It's crispy around the edges with little shreds of potato and sweet potato trailing seductively from a perfectly golden brown, tender center. It sort of reminds us of the sun, or, less abstractly, of what we'd like to be eating right now. The fact that this fritter's creator, Molly Watson of The Dinner Files, originally intended for this to be a potato latke makes us love it even more.

We know the pain and sorrow of potato latkes -- indeed, our mother's first and only attempt to make the starchy little devils resulted in an unscheduled visit from the fire department -- so we can sympathize with the myriad frustrations Ms. Watson describes on her blog. And we can also relate to the unexpected joys of happy kitchen accidents that yield gorgeous fritters like this one, particularly if they're accompanied by a few spoonfuls of applesauce or tangy Greek yogurt. So please, go fritter some time away -- yes, we went there -- with Molly.

[Via The Dinner Files]

Source

A few months ago I became friends with someone from Georgia (the one in Eastern Europe). He got me interested in the cuisine of that nation and I eventually ordered myself a Georgian cookbook, which I now love. I've been amusing myself by trying new dishes and seeing how close I get to what the dish is supposed to be like.

Georgian cuisine is all about fresh everything, with lots of fruits and vegetables and wine. Did you know it's thought that wine grapes originated in Georgia, and that it is probably the birth place of viniculture? This is just one fact that Georgians are proud of, and believe me they are proud of everything Georgian.

A while ago I tried this recipe for sage and mint fritters called pyshki. My friend didn't really know what they were, so I hope it's just a dish from a different region than where he's from (rather than my cookbook being wrong). The fritters were really good. You basically just make a very batter-like yeasted dough, let it ferment for about an hour or so, then drop it by the spoonful into a fryer of some sort. The only problem with the original recipe is that it doesn't call for salt. I ended up sprinkling salt over the fritters as they came out of the oil and they tasted great. Very fresh and summery tasting, we used them almost like bread (because I made them too big)which is a required item at every Georgian meal. I didn't try it with Tkemali, which has become my favorite condiment, but I bet it would be a great combination. The recipe is after the jump.