Photo by Heather Cross

Fritters can be a fun way to eat your vegetables. There are a couple of fritter recipes on the blog: one for Summer Corn Fritters and the other is for Indian Spiced Fritters with Mint Chutney. When Jeffrey made some beautiful fritters recently and only sort of followed the recipe, I knew that it was time for a general fritter post.

First off: what’s a fritter? According to Wikipedia “A fritter is a fried food usually consisting of a portion of batter or breading which has been filled with bits of meat, seafood, fruit, vegetables or other ingredients.” Typically in our house we’ve made fritters with grated veggies or corn, though after reading about fritters now I want an apple fritter for dessert tonight!

One night last week when the fridge was relatively bare, we had plenty of carrots. We also had beets. While our family members are good vegetable eaters, we often don’t get excited about carrots and beets. But pancakes! Who doesn’t get excited about pancakes? And that is essentially what the fritters we make are: pancakes with a lot of vegetables. There’s just a little bit of batter to hold them together, but enough to sweeten the deal.

Although some fritter recipes call for cornmeal, many call for all-purpose flour. That’s not happening in our house right now, but fritters are forgiving. We had some quinoa flour that needed to be used up, so in it went. I would assume a cup-for-cup style gluten-free flour would work, and I would personally try other flours. If you’re not familiar with cooking with alternative flours, start with less than the recipe calls for and work your way up as needed.

Although the recipe called for carrots, a beet fit in nicely. And it was so pretty! Any non-starchy root vegetable should work well. Potatoes cook differently and need different treatment (either longer cooking time, draining, or pre-cooking). If you really want to use potatoes, try this latke recipe from the blog.

Root vegetables are often abundant when there’s little else at the market. Try them in a new way!

Carrot Fritters

From Delicious Every Day

Ingredients:

• 6 large carrots peeled and coarsely grated
• 6 spring onions finely chopped
• 1 tsp of ground cumin
• 1 tsp of ground coriander
• 1/2 cup of fresh coriander chopped, cilantro
• 1 clove garlic minced
• 2 eggs beaten
• 1/2 cup of flour
• 1/2 tsp of sea salt
• 2 tablespoons of oil

Instructions:

1. Combine the carrot, spring onion, ground cumin, ground coriander, fresh coriander, salt and garlic in a bowl and mix to combine. Add the beaten eggs and flour and mix until just combined.
2. Heat the oil in a large frying pan over a medium to high heat and add spoonfuls of the mixture and use a spatula to flatten the mixture into discs. Cook until golden on each side, roughly 2 minutes, before draining on paper towel and placing in a warm oven to keep warm while you cook the remaining fritters.
3. Serve with a wedge of lemon, a crunchy salad and a spoonful of natural yoghurt.

Options:

• Use other grated, crunchy (non-starchy) root vegetables: beets, parsnips, turnips, etc. One beet colored a batch of fritters nicely! Also, regular onion substitutes well for spring onions. Use what you have.
• Use other vegetables, such as hominy, as we did. Jeffrey added the hominy gradually to the fritter batter, making sure he didn’t overwhelm the batter. A smaller quantity of the hominy, compared to the grated vegetables, worked well.
• Use an alternative flour. Jeffrey found quinoa flour to work well. This recipe is forgiving so many flours, or even cornmeal should work.
• Change up the spices to suit you and/or the vegetable. Jeffrey used a bit of chili powder in the hominy fritters, for example.

Printable recipe here