A street side stall selling fish fries them two times for convenience.
Initially they fry the fish for 70%, then keep it for 10 to 20 minutes. When a customer comes they fully fry that fish.
Is this safe?
cooking-timedeep-fryingfishfrying
A street side stall selling fish fries them two times for convenience.
Initially they fry the fish for 70%, then keep it for 10 to 20 minutes. When a customer comes they fully fry that fish.
Is this safe?
Best Answer
It's absolutely safe, and many professional cooks do this sort of thing all the time. Check out the ordinances for your local health department— some require a variance for using time rather than temperature as a food safety measure– but most are fine with par cooked meats being in the danger zone, usually defined as 40 to 140, for up to 2 hours if they get thrown out right away. If you par fry and cool the fish, then you should be bacteriologically safe for much longer, but it would probably be of pretty poor quality when you fried it. Nobody wants to eat an oil sponge. Keeping your oil temp up will help you keep it less greasy.
Though it varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, that 2 hour period usually starts over when the food is brought back up to finishing temperature... so if you par cooked it, held it for almost two hours and nobody got it, you could bring it up to temperature and then have another two complete hours to do something with it, or cool it and store it. Not sure what good prefried fish would be though.
You could avoid this whole thing if you had the extra time on hand for someone to butterfly the cuts so you could just fry them quickly to order.