If you have ever attended a food festival, you almost certainly have locked eyes with brightly coloured signs advertising deep-fried food.
More often than not, that food is something you never would have dreamt of deep-frying.
Deep-fried candy, deep-fried butter, deep-fried ice cream. You name it, someone has tried to fry it. But deep-fried water? Believe it or not, someone figured out how to deep-fry water.
You would think deep-fried water is just a fancy word for boiled water but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Made using a chemical compound called calcium alginate, which is a gelatine-like substance made from aqueous calcium chloride and aqueous sodium alginate that binds the water in a liquid membrane, deep-fried water first surfaced on the internet back in 2016.
Its earliest online existence can be traced back to chef Jonathan Marcus, who coated the water in flour, Panko crumbs and eggs and fried 12 drops in peanut oil. And now, years later, in a world that has completely changed, a YouTuber James Orgill has picked up where Marcus left off.
Watching the video made me deeply uncomfortable. More importantly, how does deep-fried water taste anyway? While I am imagining a drop of nothingness with a side of flour, the internet has been asking a bigger question – why?
In an interview with Vice, Orgill shared his fascination with the science behind the recipe and his disgust with the resultant dish.
“First of all, it’s surprising that you can turn water into an edible dish, and it’s a little bit comical to fry it after. It seems ridiculous to say, even impossible. It tasted really gross though. There’s no flavour, and it just tastes kind of salty and slimy,” he said.
Watch the video below.