OK folks, here's a little cooking tip for you. How many of you like to deep fry food instead of baking it? I'm talking about things that are meant to be deep fried, like french fries and mozzerella sticks. Well, I like doing just that, but I run into a problem, particularly with mozzerrella sticks; little crumbs fall off the food and into the oil and it makes little burnt crumbs in the oil that gets on the food after a while. Now there are 2 options;

1. throw out the oil.

2. remove the burnt crumbs

Now if you know this will be the last thing that you fry with the oil, the obvious action is to throw the oil out. It's done. Now if you're like me and you use the same oil over and over again because it still has the properties of cooking oil, just a little dirty, then you want to clean the oil. So, how does one go about this. Well, I found 2 methods. It should be noted that these methods only work for smaller amounts of oil. They are impractical for large deep fat frier vats.

Method 1, fried cheese. One of the nice things about melted cheese is that it's quite sticky. If you fry cheese properly in the crumb filled oil, the cheese will gather the crumbs and later come right out. Here's what you do.

1. put enough cheese in the pan to cover the bottom

2. turn the heat on low. on my stove that goes from 1 to 10, I use level 2.

3. stir cheese to reach all area of the pan and oil, adding more cheese as necessary.

4. continue to fry until cheese solidifies

5. once solidified, pull out of pan.

6 (optional). enjoy deep fried cheese

Please note that this will use up some oil and will waste cheese if you decide not to eat it afterwards. However, if done properly, this will remove the burnt crumbs from your cooking oil. Now if you have a smaller amount of oil, or don't have cheese on hand, or don't want to waste cheese/eat something super unhealthy, method 2 is to strain it. For this you will need a disposable coffee filter and something to catch the oil in. I used the pan after transferring the oil to a small dixi cup. These steps can be altered to suit your needs.

1. transfer the oil from the pan to a dixi cup. This is to temporarily hold the oil.

2. quickly rinse and wipe out the pan. You aren't cleaning it for storage, this is just to get the extra bits of crumbs out that didn't leave with the pouring of the oil.

3. set the pan on a surface such that it is tilted with one side higher than the other, but not to high

4. open up coffee filter and hold over pan

5. pour oil from dixi cup into coffee filter and lean against the edge of the pan on the tall side, adjust pan as necessary

6. let sit until all that reamains is crumbs and stubborn oil

7. dispose of used coffee filter and crumbs.

And there you have it, 2 ways of removing crumbs from cooking oil. I hope this helps. This has been pokematic, signing off, and bu-bye.