A Moment on Your Lips, Forever on Your Muffin Top
What I miss the most living in the US are bite-size street foods like these fried dough twists | 麻花. What a wonderful snack for any time of the day! They are crunchy, light, and subtly sweet. White Boyfriend grabs these by the grubby handfuls like they're potato chips. Five hours later we realize we've eaten about twenty of them and have no room for dinner.
My point is that these are dangerously good, but they're like tiny doughnuts that you don't realize are doughnuts. Consider yourself forewarned. Now get your pantry ingredients ready.
Mix these with some oil and water to form a smooth, hard dough. It is imperative that it is hard (that's what she said) so that the twists maintain their shape and don't stick to each other like fly paper before frying.
Working with about a third of the dough at a time, follow the steps below to create little rectangles. The thickness of the dough that you roll out should be a little less than a quarter of an inch. The sliced pieces you end up with may be irregular in shape, but it doesn't matter as long as you can cut a slit down the middle that doesn't reach either end.
Take one of the dough rectangles in your hands and pull one end through the center slit so that the dough is twisted. Repeat again with the same end so that the dough is doubly twisted.
Rinse and repeat. A LOT.
Now fry in batches in a pot of hot oil, flipping each twist after golden brown per side. They'll all bob along at the top in a happy sea of scalding bubbles. Chopsticks are the perfect tool for this task, unless you suck at using chopsticks, in which case you'll end up with burnt dough twists and the fire alarm going off. On the topic of fire alarms, we just moved and I haven't heard the fire alarm once! Hmmm, do we even have a fire alarm?
Have a paper towel-lined plate ready to receive these little bursts of sunshine. They'll taste light and crunchy, a silver bullet to White Boyfriend's muffin top while he obliviously munches away.
For the straight-up fried dough twists recipe, click here.