Limit Fried Food
Okay, let me see if I’m getting this straight…
You’re an evil-doer whose heroic adversary has been captured by their henchmen and instead of immediately shooting them with a gun or bashing them in the head with a tire iron, you now have to do the classic bad guy thing of dragging shit out to dispose of them in an overly dramatic fashion.
That’s the situation you find yourself in, huh?
Well, you can try staples like burying them alive and strapping them to a rocket or table-saw conveyor belt but can I interest you in boiling them alive in a vat of hot oil?
Very similar to an acid pool but without the risk of producing noxious fumes that make the air so poisonous to breathe that your archenemy would die before even getting thrown in and having their flesh melted off, hot oil is a much more practical choice for inflicting a slow and painful demise.
I know, your curiosity is piqued!
However, as intrigued as you are by the idea that’s now up for your consideration, it’s going to take a lot of oil to pull it off and that has you not fully committed because of the thought of all the scrambled eggs, French toast, pancakes, doughnuts, onion rings, chicken strips, tater tots, seared steak, and other delicious fried food the gallons of oil could be used to make instead of getting used to dispatch with your foe in an elaborate and completely unnecessary way.
Seeing that your love of fried food is strong enough to interfere with your ability to show off how cartoonishly evil you are by making your enemy’s death as devious and over the top as possible, it appears this is where I have to tell you that shouldn’t be the case because fried food isn’t exactly the best thing to be eaten that much.
Nope!
Without getting too much into detail, frying is defined as the use of hot oil as a medium to transfer heat to food and can be performed in four ways that vary based on a number of factors, such as the amount of oil and depth of cookware.1Fats like butter, lard, shortening, bacon grease, and beef tallow may also be used to fry. What’s written in regard to oil also applies to them. These techniques include pan frying, sautéing, stir frying, and deep frying.2The latter primarily involves the use of a deep enough cooking vessel that allows for the full immersion of food in oil while the others involve inserting food into a significantly lesser layer of oil in a shallow pan. As for air frying, it isn’t included among the bunch as a form of frying because the act of frying isn’t what happens with the use of that particular cooking appliance. Although a small amount of oil may be used, food in an air fryer doesn’t get cooked by the hot oil surrounding it, as is the technical case with frying. Instead, food in an air fryer gets cooked in the same manner as convection ovens, which is by the circulation of hot air around an enclosed space. The preparation methods are different in their respective ways but what they all share in common is that they each cook food faster than the use of air, water, and steam in other cooking methods. That speed is one of the benefits of frying, in addition to the crispy texture, moist interior, and richness of flavor that’s imparted on certain fried foods by the physical and chemical changes that occur as part of the frying process.
Virtually everything can be fried by itself with oil or with a coat of batter or breading to help protect the item from coming into direct contact with the high heat of the frying oil and then drying out as a result. What’s left after that is a product that satisfies the palate. That ability to make food more appealing to eat is one of frying’s clear advantages, as well as that of its quickness. Both of these benefits are among the reasons why fried foods are a popular choice to prepare at home and order when dining out.3What’s “home” for regular people are dwellings like bungalows, cottages, condos, cabins, townhouses, and apartment buildings, for instance. However, since you’re a supervillain, “home” for you is more than likely a lair that’s based in an abandoned warehouse in a rundown part of town, the top floor of a corporate skyscraper in the heart of the city, within the hollowed-out core of an extinct volcano on a remote isle, or a decaying castle atop a mountain peak in some distant land where it’s perpetually night and raining and the air is thick with ominous fog. However, while frying allows you to enjoy your food sooner and have a better sensory experience in your mouth, it’s a pretty detrimental cooking method.
The most glaring issue with frying is that with the use of air, water, and steam to transfer heat to food, no extra calories and nutrients are taken in by food as they’re cooked because those mediums are devoid of such. That’s not the case with oil. When cooking with oil, some of it gets absorbed by food.4The high temperature of hot oil instantly turns the water within food into steam and creates a crust on the surface of the food item. As that steam builds up, the moisture inside the food escapes through pores in the crust. That moisture then evaporates and a pressure gradient develops that draws oil into the pores to fill up space and replace the lost water. So on account of food taking in oil, which is a calorie-rich product composed almost entirely of fat, those calories and fatty acids become part of the food that’s cooked. It’s for this reason that a food item that’s fried in oil not only contains more fat than its counterpart that isn’t fried but is also much higher in calories because fat has more than double the caloric value of carbs and protein.5For example, one boiled or poached egg contains 78 calories and 5g of fat while an omelette from the same sized egg contains 115 calories and 10g of fat. As another example, one baked potato weighing 100g contains 94 calories and 0.1g of fat while the same amount of French fries contains 316 calories and 16g of fat.
The extent that oil absorption happens depends on factors like the water content and surface area of an item of food and the frying oil temperature and cooking time, as well as the type of oil. But regardless, the use of oil always presents the problem of adding to the calorie and fat content of a dish. Due to this, it’s extremely easy for fried foods to affect your ability to manage your weight the more often they’re consumed, especially if monitoring isn’t taking place by logging and tracking your food.6You’re a diabolical mastermind who’s wrapped up in devising schemes to take over the world and other sinister shit. So really, who can blame you for not having the time to measure and record everything you eat! So given that fried food can be fattening when eaten regularly, in addition to also affecting your health by raising cholesterol and increasing the risk of heart disease and diabetes, it’s best to limit fried food and employ alternative cooking methods for your choice of snacks and meals when eating out or dining at home.7In the course of frying, the high temperature of the oil may also induce the formation of several harmful compounds, such as acrylamide in carbohydrate-rich food and heterocyclic amines in protein-rich food, which may increase the risk of certain types of cancer and other conditions.8Oh, there’s a correction that you want to make that my previous guesses of where you call “home” are wrong and instead your lair is based in a space station in the cosmos above so you can literally look down on the humanity that you’re superior to and deserve to rule? Okay, that correction is duly noted! That way, you’re in a better position to reduce your calorie intake instead of contributing to it.
All in all, owing to the fact that frying has a negative effect on the dietary quality of food, items that are prepared that way should be shied from.9That is, if you don’t want to be a fat villain or an even fatter one if you already are! As such, using oil to cook someone alive in place of it going toward cooking food isn’t as big of a problem as you believed when it was broached to you to implement the substance in the theatrical murder of the goody two-shoes caught meddling in your affairs. That, of course, is operating on the assumption that you’re going to be successful with your complicated attempt to do away with your nemesis, which we all know you’re not because as the stereotypical bad guy you are, you’re destined to do some totally genius supervillain shit that provides an opportunity for them to narrowly escape from the perilous clutches of doom and thwart your dastardly plan for the bajillionth time.10For example, instead of immediately shoving them into the tub of scalding oil, you’ll probably secure them with rope to some mechanical contraption above it and adjust the machine’s settings to the slowest speed. Then as they’re lowered toward the bubbling liquid at a creeping pace, you’ll leave the area before knowing for certain that they’re dead and then act completely surprised when you later learn that they survived thanks to help arriving to save them or by cutting themselves loose with a conveniently placed sharp object that you overlooked. Either that, or you’ll gaze off in the distance and go on an extended monologue that provides exposition of your motive and reveals important details about your plot, which will inevitably come back to bite you in the ass when the information is used against you by your do-gooder rival after they finish freeing themselves, which they were busy doing while you weren’t paying careful attention to them. As a result, no oil will be used and contaminated by having their remains in it, thus the oil can be recycled to fry all the food you want to your heart’s delight. So yeah, what does it matter anyway!
Glossary: calories, dietary fat, fat, food
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