If writing for the Guardian has taught me anything over the years, it is to dread Christmas. For with Christmas, more often than not, comes a horrible food dare. There was the year when I had to try every Christmas-flavoured snack on the market. The year where I ate so many mince pies that I very swiftly lost the will to live. The year where an editor, who I can only assume I had unwittingly wronged at some point, made me eat Christmas cake until I was able to fail a home breathalyser test.
This year, I really thought I was going to make it all the way to 25 December. And then, last week, the news emerged that The Almighty Cod, a fish and chip shop in Hartlepool, had started to sell portions of battered sprouts. For £1.80, it serves up eight to 10 steaming veggie balls (its recommended accompaniment, luxury cheese sauce, costs extra), in a move that some social media users have dubbed “wrong on so many levels”.
And now, thanks to The Almighty Cod, I have to deep-fry an entire Christmas dinner. Is it time for Christmas dinner? No. Do I like deep-fried food? Not really. Nevertheless, I accepted the challenge. Below, you will see a list of every Christmas dinner component I attempted to deep-fry, and a score out of 10. Merry Christmas to you.
Turkey
If you follow any Americans on social media, you will know what a silly idea it is to deep-fry a turkey, because you will have seen videos of people filling metal dustbins with superheated oil and then dropping in a whole turkey, which always results in an Oppenheimer-level explosion. Clearly, I was not going to try that. Partly because I am a stickler for health and safety, and partly because my little deep-fat fryer only has a 1kg maximum capacity.
However, supermarkets sell individual 1kg turkey legs for about three quid, so this is what I attempted to do. I have to admit to being a little overconfident, telling anyone who would listen that I would essentially use this as an opportunity to make a supersized KFC, and that if it worked this would definitely be Christmas dinner this year. I marinated the leg in buttermilk overnight and made an approximation of the KFC spice blend. I dropped the turkey into the fryer and it immediately started to smell delicious. It came out and it looked delicious. And then I bit into it. There is a reason why people don’t serve deep-fried turkey legs at Christmas, and this is because the texture is horrible. It’s stringy, hard and weirdly slimy. Plus, I cannot with any confidence be sure that it was properly cooked. I took one mouthful and, fearful of festive food poisoning, abandoned ship. 1/10
Potatoes
I know – I should have tried to deep-fry a roast potato here. But I’m afraid the phrasing of the dish threw me a little. How do you deep-fry a roast potato? Do you just deep-fry a potato? Because if so, wouldn’t that just be a fried potato? Or do you have to roast a potato, then let it cool, and then deep-fry it? Anyway, this is a long way of saying that I cheated and deep-fried some mashed potato instead.
This made some amount of sense to me, because a good roast potato is crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, which sounds like exactly what you’d get if you just threw a handful of mashed potato into a deep-fat fryer. And I’m willing to declare this one a partial success. Pop a deep-fried mash ball in your mouth and it will explode into a soft, creamy, crispy, chewing extravaganza. It is extremely delicious. The problem is actually cooking the stuff. When very hot, a deep-fried mash ball is basically a dollop of molten slime: it is almost impossible to get one to a plate intact. The results might be hideously unpicturesque, but I promise you that they tasted good. 7/10
Stuffing
The Cod Almighty also sells deep-fried stuffing balls, which I assume are better than the ones I made, because the ones I made were rubbish. Admittedly, this might be my fault. Had I done the work and sourced some good-quality fresh ingredients, these might have been the highlight of the meal. But that’s not what I did. What I did was shrug, buy a box of Paxo and hope for the best.
It didn’t work. Paxo balls are quite dense and dry, a combination that doesn’t lend itself particularly well to deep-fat frying. The end result is claggy and disappointing, like a scotch egg that doesn’t have any egg in it. Imagine waiting for the glorious payoff of wet yolk, and it never arriving. You’d be miserable, wouldn’t you? You’d be left with a sphere of fatty matter that you’re not even fully sure that your body can properly digest. 2/10
Pigs in blankets
I’m going to make this brief, because we all know where this one is going. We’ve all thought: “Hey, isn’t a deep-fried pig in blanket just a battered sausage?” And the answer is yes. Yes, of course it is. And everyone loves a battered sausage, don’t they? Except – get this – these are better than battered sausages because they’re covered in bacon before they’re battered. I don’t need to tell you that these were delightful because, like me, you’re suddenly kicking yourself for not serving deep-fried pigs in blankets every Christmas. I know I will be from now on. What an absolute gamechanger. 10/10
Sprouts
I have to apologise to The Almighty Cod here, because I messed up their recipe a bit. As you already know, they batter their sprouts before frying them. I suspect that this works really well, helping to steam the sprouts beneath their protective batter overcoats. But that isn’t what I did. I just tipped my sprouts straight into hot oil, on the say-so of the first recipe that came up online when I Googled “deep-fried sprouts”.
As such, the results probably weren’t chip-shop ready. But they were still quite decent. I once tried shallow-frying sprouts with bacon, and my dad spent the rest of dinner haranguing me for having ideas above my station. But I think that he’d like these deep-fried sprouts because they simultaneously maintain the crunch of a fried sprout and the essential sproutiness of their boiled cousins. Which would be just great if I liked sprouts. But I don’t. Nobody does. 5/10
Carrots
I had zero hopes for deep-fried carrots. I only decided to make them to create a vague patina of healthiness on an otherwise uncomfortably fatty plate. And yet, dare I say it, they might just go down as the hit of the entire meal. I pinched the recipe from the website of a soy sauce company, and it couldn’t be easier. You chop a carrot into batons, dump them in a sandwich bag with some soy sauce for an hour, then roll them in seasoned flour and fry them. And they’re incredible, the saltiness of the soy offsetting the sweetness of the carrot perfectly. Forget Christmas, I’m going to start making these all the time from now on. 10/10
Christmas pudding
Christmas dinner isn’t Christmas dinner without dessert. A mum at my kid’s school suggested that I might want to try deep-frying a whole mince pie, but no. I went for something a little more elegant: a supermarket Christmas pudding that I smashed into pieces and squeezed into balls.
Again, I’m willing to declare this one a hit. The deep-fried Christmas pudding ball works on a number of levels. First, Christmas pudding has always deserved battering. There’s a pleasing crunch to it that helps break up its otherwise infinite clag. Second, it turns out that one small ball of Christmas pudding is exactly the right serving size. It’s nice to eat, rather than the obligation it usually becomes on Christmas Day. If I had a single entrepreneurial bone in my body, I’d start a street food chain selling only battered Christmas pudding balls, and I’d make enough money to get out of the Christmas food dare game altogether. 9/10
