I Believe I Can Fry
How a mild-mannered database analyst became the undisputed king of the fair park fryers—and the master of a heart stopping new culinary movement.
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For a few years he carried on a kind of double life as an office worker and a concessionaire. Gonzales was still living at his parents’ house, even though his parents had moved out in 2000. (“It’s really, really strange,” he says. “I just never left.” ) Then, in 2005, Gonzales returned from a month-long vacation in Egypt and saw in his pile of mail an envelope from the fair. The announcement within stated the rules for the Big Tex competition, as well as a theme: Elvis. “That made me think right away: peanut butter, banana, and jelly sandwich,” he said. Though the deadline had passed, he immediately called the head office and begged them to take a late entry. They did. A day later, he dusted off his home fryer from Target and started to experiment. The product that resulted from his trials was simple and delicious: a standard PB&J sandwich with banana, battered, fried, quartered, and served dusted with powdered sugar. It won the 2005 award for Best Taste.
Each subsequent year, Gonzales tried to outdo himself. In 2006 he won Most Creative for Deep-fried Coke (“Smooth spheres of Coca-Cola-flavored batter are deep-fried, drizzled with pure Coke fountain syrup, topped with whipped cream, cinnamon, sugar, and a cherry” read the fair guide). In 2007 he won Best Taste for Texas Fried Cookie Dough. This was followed by the deep-fried pineapple ring topped with the frozen banana-flavored whipped cream (the only entry of Gonzales’s not to win an award). By the end of 2008, he thought the attention had peaked. “I had been on ABC. I had done interviews in Australia and Argentina,” he said. “I was taking stock of everything and I was going, ‘That was a once-in-a-lifetime trip. I’m never gonna have that again.’ ”
Oh, how wrong he was. In 2009 he figured out a way to deep-fry a pat of butter. The concept alone was going to attract people; he knew that. But he had no idea how it would take off: Though it has a long way to go to catch up with the corny dog, fried butter can now be found at fairs around the country. “It’s just amazing,” he said. “One night a friend called me up and said, ‘You’re on Letterman’s Top Ten,’ and I was like, ‘No frickin’ way!’ ” (The late-night comedian deadpanned, “This is why the rest of the world hates us,” before launching into his “Top Ten Questions to Ask Yourself Before Eating Fried Butter.”) The money was good, but the real payoff was something unexpected for a concessionaire: fame. “I mean, all of a sudden TV programs like Oprah come to your booth and you’re a star,” he said. “For those three weeks, you’re it.”
At age forty, Abel Gonzales discovered that he had a gift. It wasn’t necessarily deep-frying. It was dreaming up bizarre concepts. “Did you ever watch The Honeymooners?” he asked me. “The whole show revolves around this guy coming up with megamillion ideas, and I swear I’m like him. I come up with all these ideas.” One of his proposals is a thirty-minute TV show starring himself, trying to solve problems in the kitchen like a one-man culinary A-Team. “Hopefully somebody will be interested in buying it,” he said. The show’s conceit summed up what Gonzales hoped would be his legacy: “There’s that idiot. He doesn’t know anything. But he figured it out.”
The day before I met Gonzales at his test kitchen, I’d called to ask if, in addition to specialties like fried butter, he could prepare some experimental items. I wanted to get a sense of the R&D process. Friends had suggested that I have Gonzales fry, among other things, a feather, an origami bird, and a small boot, but he had his own array of challenges in mind. On the large brushed-steel table, he had laid out his ingredients: Aunt Jemima buttermilk pancake mix, a can of Dole fruit cocktail, a bag of powdered sugar, a box of Bisquick, a bag of microwave popcorn, a jar of confection sprinkles, a can of pineapple rings, a whisk, tongs, a skimmer spoon, and a few red mixing bowls. The deep fryer, measuring about two feet by three feet, sat adjacent to a steel industrial stove, heating a vat of oil.
Gonzales is a natural performer. He narrates the frying process with the verve of a cooking-show veteran, complete with humming punctuated by exclamations. One of the first things he fried for me was a fruit cocktail. “Let’s get as much of this excess liquid out as we can,” he said, pushing the lid down. Then he flipped the lid and spooned the contents into a mixing bowl of prepared pancake mix. “Put that in therrrre.” He walked to the fryer and began scooping it in, but almost immediately things went awry. “No—nooo, don’t turn into a blob,” he shouted. “We might have a failure.” He moved the pieces around with a mesh skimmer spoon. “It’s not adhering to the batter,” he said, pulling the unidentifiable brown bits out of the vat and tossing them onto a plate. “I don’t know what happened. We’ll put some powdered sugar on that.” He popped a piece in his mouth and motioned that it was so-so. “Man, I don’t know what kind of fruit I just had.” Cringing, he gave his verdict: “No fried fruit cocktails. Not a success.”
We made our way through the remaining ingredients on the table. We tried the pineapple ring (“Palate cleanser!” he said), the butter, and the popcorn, whose battered kernels withered into flavorless beige blobs. Eventually, he got around to his personal Mount Everest, something so impossible to fry that he hadn’t even laid it out on the table to begin with: lettuce. His kitchen monologue revealed his conflicted emotions about this undertaking. “I love it!” he said as he pulled a plastic box of precut romaine out of the refrigerator. He popped it open and stared at his ingredients. “This is just going to be awful,” he said, shaking his head. “But we’re going all the way.”
The level of difficulty of fried lettuce is pretty high up there, right near a ten. It is novel, for sure. Whether or not it can be good is questionable. And all this is moot if it doesn’t survive the fryer. Anything plunged into 350- to 375-degree oil loses moisture quickly, and a romaine leaf is 95 percent moisture to begin with. The bubbles that you see on the surface of a pot of boiling oil are the water molecules escaping from whatever is being fried. This is how frying works—it sucks away moisture, creating a crispy shell around a (hopefully) juicy center. The starch in a potato gives a french fry sufficient toughness to withstand this experience, one that, needless to say, spells death to a lettuce leaf.
Gonzales’s batter, therefore, had to be perfect to keep the lettuce from going limp. He had selected a Bisquick batter. He tossed the leaves from the salad box into his red mixing bowl and continued his monologue. “This is good, you know? Maybe it’s not going to come out that bad. I try to be optimistic. But I just assume it’s going to be bad until I actually work with it.”
He let the leaves soak in the batter for a moment: “I think this lettuce is going to fall apart on us. I always think that whatever you’re frying is like a little baby, and you have to protect the baby from the heat of that fryer. Some things, some little babies, are just not built—can’t take it. This is what I think when I think of the salad.” (Later on, when I asked Rosana Moreira, a professor in food engineering at Texas A&M, what batter she would suggest for a romaine leaf, she simply responded, “I do not think that is a good idea, do you?”)
As Gonzales tossed a few globs of leaves into the fryer, the oil hissed and an amoeba-shape of bubbles darted for the sides of the vat. He grabbed his spoon and quickly tried to separate the pieces. “I thought for sure it’d go down,” he said. He hesitated. “There is no way this is going to hold up.”
But the lettuce was not wilting. Using the skimmer spoon, Gonzales pulled the fried leaves out of the vat and placed them in a basket on the side of the fryer. A few seconds later, he tossed about eight leaves onto a dinner plate. They looked like flattened, gnarled frogs’ legs. “I’m going to try this little piece,” he said, reaching in. He chewed for about ten seconds, revealing no expression, then looked up. “Not so bad. I mean, it’s not disgusting. I didn’t spit it out.”
I took a piece. The interior was not mushy; the stalk and veins had held on to their tough, raw consistency. But unlike eating a lettuce leaf from the garden, this was like lettuce on steroids. Oddly, it had a strong, earthy flavor with an unexpected crunch. Gonzales nodded. “It’s not like, ‘Ooh, it’s great,’ but, yeah, it’s not bad! Let’s see what happens when you finish it off.”
Other cooks might have left well enough alone. They might have moved on to a more viable project. They would have heard the ghosts of generations of fryers saying, “Abel! Stop!” But Gonzales was compulsively interested now, and his muddling had evolved from a defeatist foray into weird food science to a culinary challenge of the highest order. He assembled the finishing touches while discussing the possibilities of an even more robust lettuce or a more ambitious batter, possibly a pesto sauce or an egg wash with bread crumbs or a batter with Italian seasonings that would encase each leaf in its own personal crouton. “It’s just so out-there,” he said. He drizzled Caesar dressing on the dish and sprinkled it with shredded Parmesan cheese. We stared for a moment at what was surely the world’s first deep-fried salad. Then he handed me a fork. At first I couldn’t place the flavor, but as Gonzales started nodding and discussing its actual potential as a major draw, it dawned on me: This was the taste of blasphemy. And it was good.
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