Too low, and the food gets heavy and soggy, and we have pots full of black-on-the-outside, raw-on-the-inside chicken that’ll tell you the upshot of too high a temperature. Though I had never deep-fried anything before, I have watched enough cooking shows hammer home the importance of making sure the oil is the right temperature in making perfectly fried food that I felt confident I knew exactly what to do. As it turns out my candy thermometer–which I had patted myself on the back for finding for a low $2.99 last year–well, it’s kind of a big, fat liar. The second batch wasn’t much better, and the third, in the spirit of honesty, was still not exactly a shade of cooked you’d be proud to serve to the eight and a half people in your living room. The first piece turned instantly black and filled our 660-square foot apartment with a thick plume of smoke, just as our first guest were arriving on Sunday afternoon to watch the Giants, astoundingly, win. Well, it was eventually awesome, if you must know. There are still a few kinks being worked out, and there are still people (probably about one-third of you) for whom this site is not fully back up, but by the end of the weekend this will hopefully just be a blip on the radar screen of the complicated world of DNS propagation.īut you know what is especially unfair? It has been six whole days since this Yankee, this Jewish New Yorker without a single prior deep-frying experience under her belt, made her very first batch of fried chicken and she hasn’t gotten to tell you about it yet. However, it was all in the name of, in Martha Stewart parlance, a “very good thing” which is a long-overdue migration from a hosting system whose customer service was nonexistent and whose servers we’d apparently long outgrown to a new, shiny and already more helpful one. Did you miss me? We here at the smittenkitchen are terribly sorry about this week’s downtime I’ll do better to warn you (oh, and myself) next time.

Double dredging chicken