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Food is our soul food for a very good reason. Be it the unctuous umami flavour of a medium-rare steak or the soft, ever-so-fragile potatoes in a kachchi biryani, it is the energy we need after a frustrating day at the office.
But foodies and cooking experts cannot decide on one thing and they have been at each other’s throats for quite some time, and that is about the easier method of the two – grilling and frying.
Grilling involves cooking over direct heat, usually over an open flame or a grill, whereas frying involves submerging or placing the item on a base – usually the base is fat of a sort, such as oil, lard, butter or ghee.
The taste, flavour, smell and nutrition of a food depend on how they are processed, grilled and fried, and so the question is whether you should go for grilling or frying a food. Let’s look at them in terms of health, ease and taste to get the answer.
To prevent cholesterol clogging up your blood vessels like the clogged drains of Dhaka, grilling should be your primary choice of cooking, as it causes most of the fat to drip away, while frying makes a food absorb a ton of fat, which is extremely bad for your heart.
Arko Ahmed, entrepreneur and owner of the clothing line SYAN, is a health-conscious person. He said he always prefers a grilled food to a fried food, as the grilled food is not drenched in oil the way the fried food is. Besides, the grilled food saves oil too.
As for the golden crust of a fried samosa? It makes your digestive system’s job 10 times harder. On the flip side, most grilled food has a greater nutritional value because of all the vitamins and minerals retained within vegetables and proteins.
If home cooks are asked about whether frying or grilling is easier, most of them would say it is frying because it needs no extra tools other than what are as usual available at a kitchen room. But sometimes frying could be dangerous, especially deep frying, as a little carelessness may result in your burns, especially on your wrists.
Having little access to the tools required for properly grilling a food, most home cooks would agree that grilling is a difficult thing. Besides, even if one has the tools available, they might find it difficult in that the process of grilling a food is also complicated.
As for the taste? Ah, yes, this is the question you may have been wondering about. And this is where opinions become polarised. Most people would prefer frying to grilling. Samin Rahman, an aspiring content creator who helps people with foreign university applications, argues that a fried food tastes better than a grilled food if eaten on a regular basis.
But proponents of the grilled food will disagree on it for a number of reasons. Arko, for instance, said, “I like the smoky flavour grilled food offers. Plus, in fried food, the spices are just layered on top of the crust. You can feel the spices seeping into meats very well when they are grilled.”
There are other reasons why fried foods taste fantastic, though. Fried foods have the versatility in their methods - flash-frying, deep-frying, stir-frying and pan-frying. All these four frying methods are quite different from one another and affect the taste of a finished dish significantly. Grilled foods do not offer that broad horizon of flavour differences unless you change the wood chips used in the fire.
Fried foods can also vary in texture depending on what kind of batter you use - a buttermilk batter has a striking contrast with a tempura batter. The number of fries also has an impact on what your taste buds pick up.
After all, no matter whether you prefer grilling or frying; or whether you love grilled foods or fried foods, you should master both the methods of cooking and know which you should eat or which you should eat to the limits, of course looking at the health, not the taste or the easier cooking method only.