I’ve been trying to make vegetarian finger food – fritters, arancini, that kind of thing – for my one-year-old, but it usually falls apart in the frying pan. What’s the secret to ensuring they hold together?
Juliet, London NW6
The perils of disintegrating fritters aren’t restricted to those with young babies, Juliet. Professional chefs also cock them up every now and then, as restaurateur Stevie Parle knows all too well. “I often make potato cakes for my own kids with bits and pieces of leftovers in them,” says this River Cafe graduate with years of frittelle cooking behind him, “and mine often fall apart, too, but they don’t seem to mind.” It’s not as if the end result tastes any different, he adds, so don’t treat it as a catastrophe; serve it up anyway and put it down to experience.
“There’s no one secret to avoiding collapse but, with time, you’ll get a feel for it,” says Parle, who last week opened a second branch of his popular pasta joint Pastaio at the new Market Halls West End in London, with a third already in the pipeline. “Add breadcrumbs or a little flour to a mix that’s too wet, or egg yolk if it’s too dry. And with starchy stuff like rice or spuds, a tight squeeze when shaping will help hold things together.” In other words, if a fritter falls apart in your hands, it’s unlikely to stay in one piece in the pan, so it pays to get the base right first. And once they’re in the pan, go easy on them both in terms of heat and handling; we’re not talking resilient lumps of protein here, remember.
A more radical approach is to ditch the frying pan altogether. Annabel Hunt, of Little Kitchen Social in south London, runs workshops covering everything from weaning to batch cooking for toddlers, yet she had her fair share of finger food disasters when cooking for her own baby. “I had the exact same problem as Juliet,” Hunt says, “but I was so zonked at the time, I just took the easy route for a while and reverted to purees and spoon-feeding.”
When Hunt, ex of Soho stalwart L’Escargot, felt up to adding some welcome textural variety to her daughter’s diet, she couldn’t face resuming battle with her frying pan, “so I tried doing courgette fritters in the oven and they came out a treat – crisp, light and moreish”. After further trial and error, she found an unexpected ally in the potato: “A bit of mash acts as a binding agent, while the starch helps keep them intact, too.” She adds that oven cooking means “you don’t drown the fritters in fat, either, so they taste more of the main ingredient”.
The oven also gives you more control (incidentally, the same goes for meatballs, mini burgers and the like): not only will your fritters cook more evenly, there’s less risk of burning them through over-frying, be that out of cack-handedness or because you’ve passed out on the kitchen counter due to sleep deprivation.
Don’t think you have to follow recipes to the letter, either, says Paul Weaver, chef at Noble Rot in London. Treat them as templates, not law. He cites his own one-year-old’s favourite finger food, Yotam Ottolenghi’s falafel from his book Jerusalem. “It’s a pretty traditional mix of blitzed chickpeas, herbs and spices, and it’s a keeper,” Weaver says. “But I shallow fry them gently instead of deep-frying, because they’re really quite delicate, and I hate cleaning a fryer full of little burnt bits. It’s healthier, too. I also shape them into cakes, not balls, because I think they’re easier for small fingers.” In fact, he says, there’s just one drawback: “My daughter shoves them in so fast, I don’t get a look-in.”
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