fryntoing

To frynto is to cook in a frying pan with fat as both a medium and an ingredient. ("Frynto," rhymes with "pinto," is a completely made-up word from fry + into, because the fat both fries and goes into the food.)

How much fat for frynto?

 

Enough to slick, or even puddle, the bottom of the frying pan.

The archetype of frynto dishes is fried potatoes. The fat serves as a medium for cooking the potatoes, but it's also incorporated with the potatoes into a combination of almost unholy melting deliciousness. You can start with a cold pan, as in the cold-pan sauté, add fat, add the potatoes, then put the whole shebang over a medium flame and let it cook away. The potatoes will absorb heroic quantities of fat, no worries about greasiness.

Fryntoing is obviously not a technique to use every day, but once a year, or even once a month if you're young and strong and run five miles every day before breakfast, a rich dish of fried potatoes, or squash, or eggplant, or sweet potatoes, or plantains, is an extraordinary (both senses of the word) treat.