I love fried foods and can't get enough of them, but it's in my best interest to enjoy them in a more healthy way.
I heard about Tefal's Actifry kitchen appliance around 2 years ago and I spotted it again in the store a couple of weeks ago and decided I must have it coupled with the fact that someone brought me some really lekker and expensive olive oil from Syria 3 weeks ago.
So instead of buying the basic model at the store for 200€, I snapped up the deluxe "Gourmet" version online for 187€.
How the system works is like a pan fryer with a sous-chef doing the "turning and flipping" duties for you. The results, I must say, are better tasting than deep-fried crap and everything just turns out so crispy on the outside and moist inside.
We cooked a dinner for 3-4 at my house on the weekend with 4 chicken breasts with some delicious sauce we found in the recipe book provided. For that, we only required 1 tablespoon of oil! The recipe involved some Sherry vinegar, crushed peanuts, garlic, onions, salt+pepper, fresh koriander and fresh parsley.
For chips, we used less oil and cooked up 1kg of potatoes and they taste better than what you get in a real London fish and chip shoppe.
At this moment, I'm trying something new with a mix of 8 frozen chopped herbes, bacon bits and some unroasted, crushed peanuts added to potatoes and parsnips near the end of the cooking cycle. The potato and parsnip mix are cooked with 1 1/4 teaspoons of premium olive oil.
I've also tried the "sweet potato fries" you're starting to find around Canada in premium restaurants and steakhouses and they turned out just delicious!
Has anyone else had the pleasure to own one of these things? My first couple of weeks have just been great!
Some things I plan to experiment with:
- Pork filet medallions in home-made red wine-thyme sauce
- My own lamb filet recipe with a mix of spices and fresh herbs with butter
- A couple of other pork recipes I sometimes use
- A recipe I'm currently perfecting for an original Wiener Schnitzel from hammered veal culets. (This will have to modified somehow, probably by cutting up the schnitzel into mini-schnitzels.
- Bacon-wrapped chicken chunks on tooth-picks.
