I Highly Recommend Rolling Your Fried Foods in Semolina Flour.
Learning a completely new way for me to use a familiar ingredient is one of my favorite parts of cooking. It’s exciting and humiliating – a nice little reminder that, by and large, I don’t know a damn thing about shit. The most recent example of this is semolina flour: I only used it in bread baking about a week ago, when I was delighted to find that it also makes the best coating for fried foods I have ever tried in my life.
I first heard about this technique from an article about semolina by cookbook author Nick Sharma, The Taste of Cooking , which was originally published in 2018 but has been re-posted on social media in the past few months. The name – “Grainier than flour, crispier than breadcrumbs” – immediately bribed me. I love crunchy fried foods, I hate dealing with breadcrumbs, and I just happen to have a full packet of semolina flour left over from the time I swore I was going to “really get into making fresh pasta.” (I didn’t.) If anything, it seemed like a good way to take advantage of a neglected pantry ingredient.
It turned out to be much more. First, we need to talk about texture: although semolina is a wholemeal flour made from durum wheat, when roasted, it turns into a cross between cornstarch and cornmeal. Like cornstarch, semolina forms an extremely thin crust on fried foods, ideal for delicate ingredients that can be overwhelmed by heavy batter or thicker dredges. But unlike corn starch, semolina crust is crunchy , not crunchy. It is surprisingly coarse, but finer and less grainy than cornmeal. This photo shows how thin the coating is:
In addition to its excellent texture, I have found semolina flour to be easier to use and far more versatile than any other dredge (or batter) I have tried. Last week I used it on Baked Parmesan Eggplant Slices, pan sautéed Tofu Cubes, and of course the Chicken Thigh Schnitzel like in the photos above. I didn’t use a liquid binder to help the flour stick; I just pressed the surface of the food into the semolina and went after it. Each dish turned out perfect, which surprised me a little. I usually use a different kind of dredge for each—plain flour for eggplant, cornstarch for tofu, and traditional 3-step breading for chicken—but obviously I don’t need that anymore.
To make your own semolina crust fried snacks, all you need is some of the food you want to fry and some semolina flour. Drier foods (such as cauliflower, mushrooms, or green beans) may require dipping in beaten eggs or milk, or brushing with mayonnaise , to help the flour stick, but anything that exudes its own liquid should be able to pick up a lot of flour. on one’s own. Shake off the excess, pop into hot oil (or hot oven or deep fryer) and you have a perfectly crispy fried snack with minimal hassle.