Keto Zucchini Fritters

Hi guys, I'm in the kitchen. It is Sunday fun day. We're going to make some zucchini. Well, it depends what you want to call them fritters. Do they call them fritters if you're in the South? I think it's a fritter. We call them pancakes like kind of like potato pancakes. But anyway, whatever you call them. Why do I always cook things that are called like 12 things? My contrary nature. Anyway, whatever they are, they are delicious. The ingredients are super simple. What are you like? What are you even talking about zucchini fritters? So it's green onions. Aka scallions zucchini. Aka courgette pure European. We've got salt which isn't everything and then a lovely Parmesan Reggiano the grated kind so it's like powdery and then oil olive oil. That's that's pretty much it. You can add a pinch of coconut flour, but I find it unnecessary, but you can if you want. All right, guys, let's get to it and I'll walk you through how I do this. All right, let's do it. Okay, you're going to take your zucchini and you're going to cut off that little brown end and you're going to grate leaving on the stem end so that you can use that as a handle when you get to the end. So you're just going to grate all the zucchini. It'll be a good workout. But when you get too close, make sure you use that as a little handle because you don't want to grate off your fingers. Okay, so once you've got all your zucchini grated, you want to make sure it's all in your bowl and then you're going to move that into a colander because the next step is going to be to drain it. So move your zucchini into your colander and then you're going to add salt because we need to pull the moisture out of that zucchini. So I lay it so there's lots of zucchini surface showing, sprinkle the salt over the surface and then mix it together. Careful not to throw the salt through the colander where it won't do any good. Make sure it gets on the zucchini and then you're going to stir that up to get that well distributed and then, you know, fling some on the counter. It's an act of good luck. No, it's mostly because I just cannot cook without flinging things. It's just, it's my skill. So then you're going to let this sit once that salt you feel like is pretty well distributed. You're just going to put that in a bowl, leave that in the colander. Make sure your colander has something under it, right, that you don't want it to just drain on the counter because quite a bit of liquid is going to come out of that. So you're just going to let that sit for 20 minutes. So around the time the 20 minutes are up, I start the scallions. I take off anything less than ideal. So if the edges look curly, obviously you're going to move the roots. You're just going to take that and throw it away. If anything looks a little yellowy, just take that off and then you are going to start the slicing. Now, I like to slice across the long way on the lighter white tips of the scallions. Those are a little more, a little stronger. And so this way I get a little smaller pieces on the stronger end and bigger pieces on the green end. It's optional, but I like to do it. And then you're just going to slice that scallion into small pieces. You don't want them too big because these are kind of small little pancakes that you're making out of it. So make sure the pieces aren't too big. If you find any pieces look a little oversized, just pick them out and make them a little smaller. And then once all of that is sliced, I give it a little like rough chop over the top just so that some pieces are bigger, some are smaller. I find that adds to the general pleasingness of my pancakes. So now your 20 minutes on the straining are up. And so we're going to go back to our zucchini and we're going to give it a good mash. So press it out a few times. Then I start squeezing it. And then as I squeeze more of the water out, it forms a ball. It'll easily form a ball anyway. And then I find that very efficient. So back and forth in my hand, squeeze, press, squeeze, press, squeeze, press. If you don't like to be so hands-on, you can put it in a clean dish towel and wring it out that way. But then you end up with a dirty dish towel and I'd rather wash my hands than a dish towel. So again, you just do this over and over again. This actually takes a while to wring all that water out, but you want to give it a good go here. And so back and forth, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, press, press, press until it feels like, you know, when you squeeze it, it's not completely dry, but you're not getting a ton of water running over your hands anymore. It's what I would call moderately dry. So it's not completely bone dry, but you're not getting a ton of water out of it anymore. And at that point, I would say it is ready. And you can see here how much green liquid you have. It looks like some type of drink, but you can see from where we started, there's a ton of water that has come out of that zucchini. Okay. So now we're going to move that zucchini into a bowl. We're going to add the scallions and the Parmesan cheese. So then we're going to mix it because that ball of zucchini got kind of tight. You want to loosen that up. You want a very equal distribution with the scallions and the cheese, and then I'm going to beat an egg once that's well distributed and add that beaten egg to the mix and stir it in. So that again, we have a nice, yeah, it might be stretching it to call it a dough, but you know, you might consider it a type of a dough, a vegetable dough. So you want to get that nicely distributed. I find it helps to stir it up quite a bit. And then once you feel like it is well incorporated, I know it doesn't look very wet, right? But that's okay. It just has to hold together. It doesn't need to be super wet. So what we're going to do now is we are going to heat our oil. So you're going to put in this is a 10 inch skillet. I put a I put three quarters of a cup of oil. You want enough oil so that it's half covered. So the fritter isn't completely covered. It's just half covered. And now I'm going to make my little fritter. So I take out like a tablespoon like a, you know, a large spoon size. That's about how much I will need and I'm going to pat those into flat little pancakes. And I just continue with that dropping them in the oil as they're finished using my hands to shape them and you know the oil is ready for them to go in when if you drop a little piece of onion in there, it sizzles up. You'll see bubbles start to form and as you drop the pancakes and they'll be they'll be bubbles. Why I drop a little piece of something in there first is because that way I don't waste a whole pancake, right? If you put one into early it absorbs the oil in a weird way. So you want it to be burbling before you start dropping the pancakes in and so just drop all those pancakes in. I do it one at a time. I just am aware of the order and I continue to turn them or take them out in the order. I put them in so because they cook pretty quickly. We're going to use a fork. If you find one if they're like kind of rounded on the top you want to be flat on the top. So just flatten those with a fork or some flat implement in the oil and you see we've got this oil on a medium on the heat. So you don't do these at a high heat. They'll burn you want it on medium heat. After about four to five minutes, you're going to turn them. You can see I use here a spatula and a chopstick because I find they're a little delicate. So having that chopstick essentially to act as a finger can be super helpful because you don't want to break those. They're not ready to turn until that spatula can go under and you feel like it's not going to fall apart like you can tell when it's too soon. You want them browned but not super browned and then you can flip them over and so it's about four to five minutes on a medium heat is what I find works. If you start to feel underneath and it feels loose, you can see what I just did there. It felt a little loose. I decided to give it another 30 seconds. And so now I'm ready to flip it and once those are all flipped again, cook it about four to five minutes on the other side and then you're ready to flip again. So you can see here we're flipping again. And what I do is I actually when I go for the second flip, I flip them back over. So we've gone from side one to side two back to side one at this time. Why am I doing that? Because I find that's a great way to check they're done. And if the second side is a little more done than the first side, it allows me to leave them in there another 30 seconds or so to brown that up if they need a little more time. So once I feel like they're done, I'm going to move them to a tray with some paper towel on it. We don't want too much oil to stick to the pancakes. It's better if they drain. So I use the paper towel for that. So just carefully move them onto a surface with paper towel. And now you're going to repeat the process. So make your pancakes, put them into the hot oil, let them cook four to five minutes on that side, flip them, etc. Putting them onto the paper towel to drain when you're done. And you just continue that process until you've got all your batches done. I had three batches. I assume you'll have the same if your pancakes are the same size. So once they've all been sitting to drain a bit on that paper towel, you're going to get out a new clean paper towel on a tray or a plate and flip them over. So now you've drained both sides and then once they've sat a few minutes on the other side, move them onto a cookie sheet and pop them into a warm oven to warm them up before you serve them because you want them nice and warm to be their best flavor. They're delightful with a dollop of sour cream.