The day I realized my oil temp was way off

I'd been frying chicken at my place in Austin for like 2 years. Always got soggy breading. Then my buddy Tim used a laser thermometer on my oil. It was only at 300F instead of 350F. My cheap fryer's dial was off by 50 degrees the whole time. Did anyone else discover they were running low temps for months and ruin a ton of food?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_avery16d ago

You're actually frying at about 325-330F most of the time through the cool down, not pure 300F the whole time unless you never checked recovery. The dials on those cheap fryers are almost always wrong, but the bigger issue is letting the oil temp drop too much when you drop the chicken in.

lauras8316d ago

Fired up my cheap deep fryer for a party once and realized the same thing. My dial was reading 375 but a thermometer said it was barely hitting 320. I'd been making sad, limp fries for months before that.

blake69116d ago

The_avery brings up a good point about recovery time, but I read somewhere that cheap fryers also tend to have heating elements that burn out unevenly after a few months. So even if the dial was wrong from day one, it probably got worse as time went on. I had a buddy who tested his with a candy thermometer, and his dial was actually set at 350 but the real temp kept dropping after the first batch because the element couldn't keep up. Makes you wonder how many bad chicken dinners came down to a $20 appliance just giving up under load.