Preparing to Cook a Fried Zucchini Recipe

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Louis Ortiz on behalf of Expert Village and today I am going to show you the basic breading and frying procedure for a vegetable; I've chosen a zucchini today. I've cut off the top there, I'll take the bottom off here with my utility knife and we are just going to cut this guy into some simple rings which will make it easier to eat. We are going to keep them all uniformed so that they will cook at the same time and be done at the same time. I've got a counter top fryer here. It is set to about 365 which is a pretty good temperature for these. As you know as a vegetable, these won't take this long to cook; vegetables don't and that's good. It's a good process for frying simply because they don't have to sit around in the oil and tumble around any longer than they need to. I've got just a basic all purpose flour here in my first bowl. In my second bowl, I've got some low fat milk and egg here which I need to beat and this is just a milk and egg wash; a real basic one, just those two items. In the third bowl, I've got some seasoned bread crumbs here that I have purchased from a grocery store and poured straight out of the package into the bowl, making it real nice and easy. The reason for the 3 set breading procedure is that you want to create something for the last ingredient to bind to and the flour first and then the milk and egg wash second, creates that for you. It kind of makes kind of a tacky glue if you will and it allows those seasoned bread crumbs to stick on there evenly and creates a nice golden finish once they are done. Beat this egg thoroughly, the yellow and the white, so that you achieve all one color here which is what we have. So we will go ahead and place these guys in the flour first and there's a little moisture on the zucchini simply because of the water content and that's good. It gives the flour something to stick to. We are just going to dip these in the milk and egg wash, turn those over. As you notice I am wearing some Latex gloves here and that keeps all the breading pretty much on the food products versus on your fingers. That tends to happen with folks as they bread these things. I breaded these four and will bread the rest of them. We will put them in the fryer; I'll show you those. Get these gloves off now. That's all I'm going to do here. Just kind of toss these around and get that final breading on the outside of these guys. The less you have to touch them, the better. Turn those over with a knife there so that we can get the other side nice and breaded. That is pretty much the color that you are looking for. Okay, everything is nice and smooth, stuck together the way that it needs to. So I am going to go ahead and finish breading the rest of these and we will come back here in just a couple of minutes and I'll show you what the finished product looks like."