How To Clean Up Your Frying Oil With One Common Vegetable

Frying can be lots of fun — if messy — work. As you're cooking doughnuts or making homemade latkes, you may notice that the oil gets darker or starts to accumulate little bits and crumbs. At this point, you could pour it out, throw it away, and start all over again. Another option may be to pour it through a filter just as you would if you planned on reusing the cooking oil later. Of course, you could also cool it all the way down and use the gelatin trick to clean it. But what if you just want to keep the oil clean longer and continue frying? Well, we've got quite the trick for you.

The word on the street is that some cooks are trying another method: dropping a trimmed carrot into the oil to clean it. Supposedly, if you put the carrot into the hot oil, it will collect the small flakes of breading or food and keep them from burning and spoiling the rest. When the carrot gets dark and wrinkly, you can strain it out, drop a fresh one into the oil, and keep on cooking. It sounds a bit unusual, but it's a trick that some folks swear by.

While we haven't seen any scientific evidence that this carrot trick works, it's popular enough that it's worth trying out at home. It could be that carrots are quicker to absorb oil than the food you're frying, due in part to their cellular structure. When exposed to heat, carrot cells break down rapidly, cracking and separating. Other vegetables, like eggplant, which contain sponge-like air pockets, are known to soak up lots of oil. So, it could be that the high heat of frying oil turns carrots into little sponges, but that's just a theory. 

Another possibility is that carrots contain more sugar than the other food you're cooking (3.4 grams per cup versus 1 gram in a regular potato, for example). Because of this, it's thought they brown quickly, leading people to (perhaps mistakenly) assume the color comes strictly from the dirty oil. But the truth is, we don't really know. With their mildly sweet and earthy flavor, carrots are unlikely to change the taste of the oil or the food you're frying. They're also inexpensive and easy to find, so you probably won't mind sacrificing a few for this experiment. If you're curious, be sure to give it a try at home.