I love fried zucchini...

Vito and Nick's has sticks, The Patio has rounds. They must be lightly battered, tempura-like(not coated with breadcrumbs) and served with creamy garlic dressing.

Any good North side fried zucchini that anyone knows about?

A typical Greek preparation is thinly sliced zucchini in a light flour crust, fried, and served with skordalia. Excellent.

annieb wrote:A typical Greek preparation is thinly sliced zucchini in a light flour crust, fried, and served with skordalia. Excellent.

An excellent version of this can be had at Periyali. This was one of the highlights of our outing there last summer.

Periyali Greek Taverna
9860 Milwaukee
Glenview, IL
847-296-2232

I like zucchini well enough, and I agree completely that it is excellent when fried. Then again, I do believe I could eat almost anything if it is fried.

Hammond

The best fried zucchini I ever had was at Harry's Bar in Venice. They served it at the bar, like one would find peanuts at the local tavern. The zucchini rounds were probably cut on a mandoline because they were thinner than potato chip thin and flash fried till crispy in olive oil, then sprinkled with sea salt. These were zucchinis from heaven. I made it a point to visit Harry's several more times during my stay just for the zucchini (and the Bellini's weren't too shabby, either.) After getting home, I tried unsuccessfully to duplicate this dish for about six months before giving up.

stevez wrote:The best fried zucchini I ever had was at Harry's Bar in Venice. They served it at the bar, like one would find peanuts at the local tavern. The zucchini rounds were probably cut on a mandoline because they were thinner than potato chip thin and flash fried till crispy in olive oil, then sprinkled with sea salt. These were zucchinis from heaven...After getting home, I tried unsuccessfully to duplicate this dish for about six months before giving up.

DB,

The ability to prepare these "zucchinis from heaven" seems like yet another excellent reason to purchase a DeLonghi deep fat fryer with rotating basket (see current discussion of same at http://lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=193)

I'm assuming you gave up was because of things like clumping?

Hammond

David Hammond wrote:
The ability to prepare these "zucchinis from heaven" seems like yet another excellent reason to purchase a DeLonghi deep fat fryer with rotating basket (see current discussion of same at http://lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=193)

I'm assuming you gave up was because of things like clumping?

Hammond

I was unable to duplicate the heavenly crispness no matter what I did. The went from slimy greasiness to burnt with no stop at HC in between. I think the problem was in my slicing technique. I didn't have a mandoline to slice them thin enough, methinks.

Pasta con le zucchine fritte

Stevez, DH:

I would guess that the method that produced the swell results in Venice was VERY hot oil (375 degrees or so) and a good size fryer, in which the addition of the zucchini slices didn't reduce the temperature much and the little green-gold disks could swim freely and happily.

One of the pasta dishes routinely made chez nous (i.e., turns up on table here once or twice per month) involves disks of zucchini fried at very high heat in olive oil. I generally use green olive oils from Sicily or southern Italy or Crete but even so, the zucchini colour the olive oil nicely, making it even greener. Anyway, I let the oil cool a bit, add garlic, hot chili, a few pomodori pelati. After the tomatoes cook a few minutes, add fresh mint, briefly toss cooked pasta and fried zucchini disks together. Serve with ricotta salata. This is a nice dish and it works best if the zucchini are fried, as mentioned above, at rather high heat. Both short and long pasta shapes can be used with this preparation.

***

Food Nut:

Sorry, I have no info in direct response to your query but all this talk of fried zucchini got me going...

A

Antonius, have you ever had the same sort of dish without tomatoes, but with scrambled egg and onion? One of my very favorites. Zucchini's affinity for eggs is tremendous.

This year I completely missed zucchini blossoms, BTW. A sad realization.

Jeff:

No but that sounds great. One of my favourite lunches is a frittata with zucchini and I think zucchini and eggs have a natural affinity with one another.

I do sometimes make pasta with zucchini without the tomato. I do that sometimes if I have good feta on hand; I finish the dish with the feta crumbled up and mixed in. The deep green oil with the white feta is a nice visual contrast.

Is that dish one that you know from your family or from elsewhere? I'll definitely try it some time, maybe as a quick piatto unico meal.

A

From familiy. I think of it a late summer dish, as my mom always had lots of squashes to use up. A good dose of fresh basil was always included. I fry the zucchini first as you describe, soften the onions with a lot of olive oil, add hot pasta to the pan and then toss with the eggs, basil, black pepper and some cheese. I take mine out while the eggs are soft, leave the rest of the family's in until they are very well done (like everything else I cook). I don't think any Cuban has ever eaten anything that could be called undercooked (that's about my inlaws, BTW).

another very good fried zucchini dish on the north side are the turkish fried zucchini fritter "mucver".

I've tried a few different versions of these around town and during the summer at home when we were trying to work through a zucchini overload and our favortie were the light crunchy ones from turkish cusine and bakery on bryn mawr and clark

These are fritters made of shredded zucchini, dill, mint, and kasseri and feta cheese. (well the recipes I 've seen online are, I don't notice much feta in the versions I've had here-which may be a reason theirs are lighter than the somewhat leaden ones I've perfected at home)

Scoozi has a zucchini appetizer, which I recommend. On the menu it is listed as Crispy Zucchini with garlic, basil and lemon.

They are fried thin slices, like potato chips, but softer.

Scoozi
410 W. Huron St.
Chicago, IL 60610
(312) 943-5900
http://www.leye.com/restaurants/rest_home.jsp?id=16

Satiate wrote:Scoozi has a zucchini appetizer, which I recommend. On the menu it is listed as Crispy Zucchini with garlic, basil and lemon.

They are fried thin slices, like potato chips, but softer.

Scoozi
410 W. Huron St.
Chicago, IL 60610
(312) 943-5900
http://www.leye.com/restaurants/rest_home.jsp?id=16

Thanks for the tip, Satiate. I'll have to get over there one of these days and see how they compare to the originals at Harry's Bar.

David Hammond wrote:I like zucchini well enough, and I agree completely that it is excellent when fried. Then again, I do believe I could eat almost anything if it is fried.

Hammond

Likewise, anything served with skordalia.

I was going to start a thread in Shopping and Cooking to ask this question, but maybe this is the place to get good info from fellow fried zucchini lovers. I have some frozen sliced zucchini, and I'm trying to find out whether or not to thaw it before deep-frying it. I found one recipe that said it would hold its shape better if frozen, just quickly wetted with cold water for the batter to stick. Every other recipe I've found pertains to frying fresh, not frozen, zucchini. Mushy fried zucchini often seems to be attributed to be due to going straight from freezer to fryer, but I'm wondering if it could in fact be due to slices getting frozen and then thawing out before freezing.

Any advice?

A great version is served at Greek Islands. It's sliced very thin, lightly battered and fried until crisp. It's served with a portion of pungent, garickly skordalia, which is a great accompaniment . . .


Fried Zucchini at Greek Islands

=R=

Yeah, the greek islands version is my favorite in greektown, thinly sliced and very crispy. Santorini's, by comparison, is thicker planks with a heavier breading, and not as well seasoned.

Katie wrote:I was going to start a thread in Shopping and Cooking to ask this question, but maybe this is the place to get good info from fellow fried zucchini lovers. I have some frozen sliced zucchini, and I'm trying to find out whether or not to thaw it before deep-frying it. I found one recipe that said it would hold its shape better if frozen, just quickly wetted with cold water for the batter to stick. Every other recipe I've found pertains to frying fresh, not frozen, zucchini. Mushy fried zucchini often seems to be attributed to be due to going straight from freezer to fryer, but I'm wondering if it could in fact be due to slices getting frozen and then thawing out before freezing.

Any advice?

I have no first hand experience with this, but I have a gut feeling that keeping it frozen is the way to go. I think frozen zucchini is going to be mushy no matter what you do with it. Far more mushy than fresh at least. I'd assume that if you have to use frozen zukes, it would be better to fry frozen, and very quickly to just get the outside crunchy and the insides warm. I'd bet that the frozen fried zukes you see in bar menus that are "better" have some kind of breading formula thing going on that makes them decent when fried from the freezer.

Out of curiosity - are these garden leftovers from last year? My first reaction was "why in the world would anyone freeze a zucchini?" - but, that's an honest question, I really do not know why. There may be a bunch of reasons - outside of having them breaded and frozen for frying, that is - but even then, it's a very fine line between total mush, and something edible.

Thanks for the input, zeebee. The one recipe I found online that recommended going straight from frozen to water to breading to fryer also mentioned that you can do the first three steps, and save breaded zucchini slices still frozen, in a plastic bag or container in the freezer, to have ready whenever you want to fry a few.

So far I think the frozen-to-fryer approach ought to be okay, but if I want to really study the matter, for my own sake and whoever else is curious, I'll need to try at least the following options and compare:

a) fresh slices fried
b) frozen slices fried
c) frozen slices thawed and fried

Sounds like the kind of experiment Cooks Illustrated would already have done, doesn't it? Alas, no, not that I could find on the CI website. For that matter, there's a mysterious dearth of recipes for fried things on the CI website. Surely they have one for chicken at least.

As for why I have these frozen zucchini slices? I, yes, BOUGHT them, frozen, in a bag, for 88 cents, just so I could learn how to deep fry them. But a little googling has shown me that gardeners all over the country have tons of leftover home-grown zucchini in their freezers and are desperate for ideas for what to do with it. Apparently one can only stand to eat so much zucchini bread in one winter.

Hi,

If you did defrost the zukes and found them watery, I would drain them. Add salt and let them drain further. They will have a texture similar to bread and butter pickles, which you could pickle. If you fried them after salting-draining, they might be a little odd looking. aesthetics aside, they will probably be fine.

Regards,

I had some really good zucchini chips at Fred's inside the new Barney's. They were thin, lightly battered and fried. I would go back just for them. They came with my sandwich. On their website it says you can get them as an appetizer and comes with soft Vermont cheese dip.