In lieu of the southern-themed dinner with the Summer Supper Club, I decided to make some fried pickles to snack on throughout the meal. I’ve only ever had fried pickles once before, but I found them to be absolutely delicious — crispy, salty, sour — and totally addictive. Like pistachios, they are impossible to stop eating once you taste one.
The problem with making fried pickles is that I don’t have a fryer. I don’t even have a deep pot that I can substitute for a fryer. Plus, I’m trying to watch my girlish figure, so eating deep fried food probably isn’t a great idea anyway. Fortunately, baking is always an acceptable alternative, and Google presented me with bazillions of different oven-fried pickles recipes to choose from.
The last time I fried something, it was jalapeno poppers. For the breading, I dipped them in milk, then rolled them with bread crumbs. Pretty standard stuff. Fried pickles, on the other hand, aren’t breaded quite the same way. They’re not dipped in anything, since they’re already moist from floating in their own juices, and they’re rolled around in a combination of cornmeal, grated cheese, and spices. Interesting.
Lesson learned from this cooking exercise: oven-fried is not the same thing as deep fried. Not even close, in fact. After sticking the tray of breaded pickles into the oven for 12 minutes like the recipe said, I expected them to come out nice and crispy like baked potato chips. Nope. They were still soggy. Soggy! I ended up sticking them back into the oven for about 15 minutes longer than the recipe asked for, and I had to flip every pickle in order to get them to crisp up on both sides. Talk about time-consuming! And they still weren’t as crisp as I wanted them to be. Next time I’m just going to buy a fryer.
Even though these suckers weren’t as crispy as they should have been, they were still pretty tasty, and every last one of them got eaten. They were salty and sour as pickles should be, but slightly zesty from the breading, and were delicious dipped in ranch dressing. The recipe definitely needs tweaking, but these are a great snack anyway.
Recipe courtesy of recipe4living.com.
hmmm, good to know. I probably would have tried to bake them also(as I, too, am watching my girlish figure). I'm glad that you tested out this recipe – I'm just going to deep-fry them as you suggested.
Actually I found some grocery stores that sell them in the frozen section all ready breaded. All you have to do is just drop em in the deep fryer. They were called "Mikes Fried Pickles" and were better than most I've had.
Whoa! Which grocery stores??
Oven-fried pickles have a unique salty and sour crispy taste.