Make Fried Cheese Curds That Are Perfectly Crispy

One thing I noticed about your trip was that you were eating these cheese curds without me and we weren't sitting at a bar eating them. Well, if it makes you feel any better, I was sitting at a bar eating them with a whole bunch of new friends. Huh. But I'm here with you now, so we're gonna have a good time. Doesn't make me feel better, but you've got some making up to do. This'll make you feel better. Okay. So these are fresh cheese curds. And just to explain, cheese curds are basically unaged cheese. There's warmed milk, they add a coagulant like rennet, the cheese coagulates, they pour off the whey, they press the curds, and then we cut them up. Now, because we're gonna drop these into a hot deep fryer later on, we're gonna need to freeze them. So as soon as they hit the hot oil, they don't start to melt immediately. So this is one pound of cheese curds, which is plenty for four people or one person. Or two friends. Two friends. We're just gonna throw these into a zipper lock bag. These cheese curds are all about one inch in length. Sometimes they come a little bit bigger, close to two inches sometimes. You just wanna break them up to be about one inch in length so they're all about the same size so they cook at the same rate. Makes sense. So we put these in a zipper lock bag, and we are gonna freeze these for at least two hours, but you could really leave them in your freezer for a full month. Okay. Anytime I had cheese curds in Wisconsin, they were always accompanied by ranch dressing. It's the law. It's written in the Constitution. We're gonna make our own ranch dressing today. We're gonna start off with our fresh herbs. It's a combination of chives, cilantro, and dill. We're gonna use two tablespoons of thinly sliced chives, and we're gonna use some cilantro. So we're looking for two tablespoons here of cilantro, one tablespoon of dill, and that is about a tablespoon. We are also going to add a third of a cup of buttermilk, a third of a cup of mayonnaise, three tablespoons of sour cream, one minced garlic clove, and we're gonna add a teaspoon of white wine vinegar, half a teaspoon of granulated garlic, a quarter teaspoon of table salt here, quarter teaspoon of pepper, and a little pinch of cayenne. And we'll just whisk this all together. We're gonna refrigerate our ranch dressing, and we're gonna throw our curds into the freezer. Our curds are nice and frozen solid. Now we could turn our attention to our beer batter. So it's really important in this beer batter to weigh the ingredients. That way it comes out consistent each time, and we're looking for the consistency of about thick pancake batter. Okay. Okay? So it's two and a half ounces of all-purpose flour here. I'm gonna add two ounces of cornstarch, one and a half teaspoons of paprika, and the paprika's not in there really so much for flavor, but for color. It lends a nice brick red color to this, okay? One teaspoon of baking powder to act as our leavener so the crust is nice and light and crispy. And we have three quarters of a teaspoon of table salt. Okay, and we'll just whisk that together. Now we can add our beer. We're gonna add two thirds of a cup of lager. So we're looking for a really mild hoppiness, mild maltiness. So we're gonna whisk this together. You see how thick it is? That's nice. Now we're gonna let this sit so the flour and the cornstarch have time to fully hydrate so it gets a little bit thicker than this. Okay. So we'll let this sit off to the side. Smells great. And we can focus on our frozen curds. So we're gonna fry this in three batches. And that's important because when we add the curds to the pot, we don't wanna overcrowd the pot. We're also gonna do a special technique where we batter each of the batches of curds in a bowl separately. I'll explain more about that in a second. But for right now, we're gonna divide these into three equal portions. So we have a pound of cheese curds here. So that comes out to about five and a third ounces per bowl, give or take. We have our curds portion out there. We have oil heating up over here. It's almost up to 350 degrees. See our batter starting to thicken up nicely. So typically whenever you're frying something, you take the food and you drop it into the larger amount of batter. You pull it out and you drop it in the oil. What I learned from Joe and Kurt is that they take a little bit of batter and they coat each bowl of curds separately. So it just barely coats the curds. That way you don't have a lot of excess batter clinging to the curds. You don't have a lot of excess batter floating in the hot oil. We're gonna take a quarter cup of our batter and drop a quarter cup into each one of these bowls. Last batch. So we're gonna just toss these around here to coat them evenly with our batter. They look like they're just barely coated. You should see some bare spots on there. I mean, they're well coated, but they're not sitting in a pool of coating. Right, and it's gonna make a difference when you drop it in the oil. So our curds are nice and evenly coated. Now to drop these in the oil, we're gonna work carefully. We're gonna get the bowl very close to the oil. We're gonna use a little dinner spoon. We're just gonna slide the curds right into the hot oil. So as soon as the last one goes in there, we're gonna start our timer for anywhere between 60 and 90 seconds. We don't wanna disturb these as they cook. Now, as they start to come to the surface and they start to spring little tiny pinhole leaks, you know they are about done. They're nice and golden brown. We can lift them out with our spider. We'll slide them right onto a wire rack. So awesome. Those look perfect. Don't they? So we're gonna let the oil return to 350 degrees because we only fry them for 90 seconds. We wanna make sure the oil is at peak temperature and those curds fry up nice and crisp really quickly. Bridget, I know this is gonna be the highlight of your day. It's the highlight of mine. Ready for some curds? Those are beautiful. And I have to say that paprika, you're right. It does make them really lovely. All right, so I just wanna point out that nice kind of melty center. Little pull. You wanna try it first naked? Yes. I mean, the curd naked? It's that squeaky chew right on the tooth. It's just fantastic. You can't eat a fried cheese curd and not smile. All right, and let's try some of this ranch dressing. I don't think I've ever had these with homemade ranch dressing, you know? The crunch on the outside, that batter, it's perfection. It's like a nice little shatter. For full episodes of your favorite cooking shows, head over to ATK's full episodes channel on YouTube. You can stream complete seasons of America's Test Kitchen, Cook's Country, and more. See you there.