Working with flour and cooking oil

[busterb]

Do you have problems with flour? I save the foam flats from store and place in sink, to season food and then flour. But in spite of hell I get flour on the whole flappin kitchen. 1 tsp of flour and I can screw up the kitchen.
Years ago the kitchen was outside the house, a dog run. I've heard it was because if the kitchen burned you would save the damn house. I submit that another reason was to keep the damn flour out of house.

Do you save, strain your cooking oil? I only use the oil from my deep fryer's over. The little bit I use in skillets gets put on dog food or in a jar for trash.

[Cloud]

plastic bags are your friend.

I don't fry things.

[Flint]

Originally Posted by Cloud

I don't fry things.

How do you eat?!

[busterb]

plastic bags are your friend.

Please explain how I'm to get the flappin flour in bag? And then what?

[Hoof Hearted]

Originally Posted by busterb

Please explain how I'm to get the flappin flour in bag? And then what?

I use the plastic grocery store bags. Spoon whatever amount of flour and seasonings you need into the bag, place in your items to be coated, grasp the handles and pull through your closed hand until you have created a (mostly) airtight 'balloon' of seasonings and items and carefully shake. I use my free hand to support the weight of the bag and use both hands to shake it around. Not vigorously, but enough to get the items coated.
hh

[busterb]

Hell No one understands, it's the freekin spooning that kills me.

[lumberjim]

Originally Posted by busterb

Hell No one understands, it's the freekin spooning that kills me.

turn the fan off first.

[Flint]

If you used cornmeal, you wouldn't get flour all over the kitchen...

[busterb]

Have you been told today? Intercourse ya'll

[lumberjim]

well, that's not very polite. I was just trying to offer some friendly advice. If your spooning leads to flour all over the kitchen, it would stand to reason that it is very windy in your kitchen....or that you have very shaky hands.....

telling me to go fuck my self is totally uncalled for....even veiled as it was. I waive my private parts at you. pigdog!

fellatio, cunnilingus, french kissing..................rimjob

[bluecuracao]

Originally Posted by busterb

Do you have problems with flour?

I haven't cooked with flour for a loooong time, but I remember how messy it was. There's usually flour on the outside of the bag when you buy it, and sometimes a little tear in the corner. So, no matter how careful you are spooning it out, some flour ends up outside of the bowl, somehow.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Waiving private parts -- this seems to imply they've gone public.

Dangerous around the deep fryer, guys. The oven door too.

[Clodfobble]

If I need to scoop out a lot of flour, I move the whole flour canister and bowl into the sink and do it from in there. That way whatever spills can just get rinsed out.

[BigV]

Cooked with flour this weekend, busterb. You're right. It's a mess if you're doing it right, and if you're doing it wrong it can be an I Love Lucy comedy sketch. There is no way to use it that doesn't spread it around.

There are ways to limit it though. A couple of thoughts not in any particular order...

I use a cannister with an airtight lid, the kind with the lever that clamps the lid down tight. That's where I store the flour that I keep in the kitchen for regular use. Refilling it from the five or ten pound bag can be messy I put the canister in the sink and pour carefully. Foof! When an avalanche of flour finally breaks loose from the bag and smashes into the cannister, I get a lovely little white mushroom cloud of powder. Eventually, I get the cannister filled to my desired level then fold down the top of the bag and into the drawer with the unwieldly bag. I actually finished off the end of a 25 pound bag of flour this weekend, topping off the cannister. Ok, maybe I saved a couple of pennies per pound on the flour, but I don't use it fast enough to justify that bulk quantity. Very cumbersome.

When I have the cannister to dispense from, I use a scoop. It's about the size and shape of a half a soup can, with rounded edges. It can hog out about a cup or more if I load it to the max, but that's rare. Usually I scoop out a smaller quantity and then transfer it to the measuring cup. I have read that flour should be measured by weight and not volume to be precise, but I'm not really a baker so I've been able to skate by using (approximate) volumes to this point. The thought of leveling off a cup measure with the back of a knife is tedious at best. Better I should change my recipe than to fuss that much.

Using cup and partial cup measure this way is pretty easy, and pretty clean, to this point. Now the mess factor really depends on what I'm making with the flour. This weekend was cornbread so the flour went into the bowl with the other dry ingredients. Not messy. Coating meat to fry is much messier. I usually just put the flour in a pile on the plate and then add the other stuff, seasoning, salt, pepper, garlic powder, etc, and then mix it with my fingers. Then I pile it up in the center of the plate again. I take the meat and *carefully* place it in the flour and press it and then turn it over and press it again. Then into the pan.

Sometimes the recipe calls for dipping the meat in egg before putting it in the flour mixture. This is a bigger mess still. Now I move my whole operation to the stovetop. I take the bowl of beaten eggs and as much of the meat pieces (chicken strips for example) that will fit in the egg bowl without trouble and put it on the leftmost side of the stove. In the center is my bowl (this time it's a bowl that holds the flour mixture since I'm cramped for space on the stovetop) with the flour mixture. On the right is the pan or skillet with the hot oil. I have found that the egg does indeed let more of the dry flour/cornmeal/etc mixture stick to the meat. Unfortunately (from a mess standpoint) my fingers are meat. So I use this mess reducing plan.

Working left to right, I use my left hand to pick a piece of meat out of the egg bowl and drop it gently into the flour bowl. Be careful not to let this wet hand touch the dry stuff. Then I use my right hand to pick up the meat in the flour bowl and turn it over to make sure it gets coated well. Sometime I pick up a little flour and press it onto the meat, turn it, unfold it, coat it. Then with my right hand, the one that has been in the flour, but not the egg, I pick up the meat and put it into the oil. Sometimes I modify this strategy by making a plateful of the coated meat pieces and then transfer them from the plate to the oil, it depends. Eventually, the fingers on my right hand will get clogged up with the flour mixture from the egg flour egg flour egg flour routine and I have to knock the crust off them to continue.

I have tried to "Shake and Bake" and it's not that great. Not the product, but the process. I'm not happy with the coating of flour I get this way, so I use the plate method.

[Sundae]

I think working with flour tidily (real word?) is something you either can do or you can't.

I took Food & Nutrition at school (cooking/ human biology) and regularly coated my work area with flour. Even when we weren't using flour. But then I also used to sneak into the stores cupboard and nibble the live yeast, so what can I say. My nemesis was the spotless girl in the opposite kitchen, who not only remained pristine through the messiest of practicals, but also produced flawless puff pastry. Ha, you can get it frozen now Katie, what are you doing to do to remain superior, eh? Not that it scarred me mentally or anything.

In those days I believed that not broadcasting flour was a skill acquired automatically when you squeezed out a baby - like being able to slice bread thinly and evenly, ditto cheese, and spread cold butter on to bread or crackers without destroying them. I decided as the years passed that these were skills obtained by living a life thriftily through necessity - if you couldn't afford to waste any kind of food you just learned to go slowly & carefully until you learned how to control wayward substances. And now I just think it's innate. It's certainly not genetic - unless it skips a generation.

Your mileage probably does vary.