Tried my hand at Fry Bread.

I’d never heard of fried bread, but I’ve eaten a lot of hush puppies. This thread reminded me of the Crisco commercials (I think it was Crisco anyway) where the housewife or daughter would deep fry a loaf of bread with all the crust cut off to show that the bread absorbed hardly any of the oil. My mom used to laugh at the commercials and say “what idiots!”

Anybody else remember those commercials? Do they even make Crisco any more? I think it was Kentucky Fried Movie that did a parody of it where the daughter fried the family cat.
 
We had a lady that cooked for our camp in Alaska. Her husband shot a couple black bears every year. They used everything. They were Tlinglit. She used bear fat in baked foods. If one of the party shot a bear they usually wanted the hide. She and her husband would use the meat and render the fat. She would usually cook a roast for the party to eat though. The lady was a real cook. She even made donuts
 
Used to call it "grease bread" back in the day. Cook in bacon grease (lard) and sprinkle a bit of sugar on it...
 
I’d never heard of fried bread, but I’ve eaten a lot of hush puppies. This thread reminded me of the Crisco commercials (I think it was Crisco anyway) where the housewife or daughter would deep fry a loaf of bread with all the crust cut off to show that the bread absorbed hardly any of the oil. My mom used to laugh at the commercials and say “what idiots!”

Anybody else remember those commercials? Do they even make Crisco any more? I think it was Kentucky Fried Movie that did a parody of it where the daughter fried the family cat.

Crisco is still around. Good for pie crusts, pot pie dishes, etc., anything with a crust.
 
There was a gentleman in I believe NYC who had reached the ripe old age of I think they said 113. When asked his secret for long life, he said it was down to his diet. They asked him what it was. The answer set people's brains on fire. He said his diet was 2 gallons of red wine a week and he only ate bread fried in fatback grease. Why fatback? "Because bacon is too damn lean!"
 
Does anybody know the origins of fry bread?

I ask because it is a well known dish here in Kiwiland. I think it was adapted by the Māori after James Cook’s visits.

If so good things are invented everywhere.
 
Many, many years ago when I was "playing cowboy," our foreman's mother was famous for her pie crusts...light and flaky. Her secret? Bear lard! Really. Every year, her husband would shoot a bear (we lived in an area that had one of the highest black bear populations in the lower 48) and she would render the fat into lard. She swore by it. It was pure white.

euWKMhs.png

That was my grandma's secret as well, grandpa would shoot a nice fat bear or two ever fall, smoke the hams and render the bear fat down in the canning shed that also doubled as his distillery. She was famous for her flaky biscuits and pie crusts, grandpa wanted biscuits with ever meal. She made a point of telling me that the main secret in making good pie crust was handle it as little as possible, better to have a few cracks in your crust than over handle it getting it a smooth texture before rolling out.
 
I’d never heard of fried bread, but I’ve eaten a lot of hush puppies. This thread reminded me of the Crisco commercials (I think it was Crisco anyway) where the housewife or daughter would deep fry a loaf of bread with all the crust cut off to show that the bread absorbed hardly any of the oil. My mom used to laugh at the commercials and say “what idiots!”

Anybody else remember those commercials? Do they even make Crisco any more? I think it was Kentucky Fried Movie that did a parody of it where the daughter fried the family cat.
I use Crisco in my bread and pizza dough
 
Might be a little off topic but I had a friend that raised a litter of weiner pigs to make a few bucks. He had a deal with the local Safeway to haul away all their vegetable scraps. I never saw his grinder operation but he said he ground all the vegetable scraps and mixed it with grain, slopped the pigs with that. I bought one of the piggies. The weird thing was the fat on the meat had a greenish tinge they weren't real fatty the lard when rendered had that same greenish tinge...just a bit weird and it had that difference in taste similar to beef that is nearly all grass fed, almost a wild flavor. I've heard something similar about pigs fed acorn or "mast" as they used to let the hogs run wild in the surrounding oaks to fatten up on mast. I've eaten bear that eat wild hazelnut and it is mighty good, there was a large grove of wild hazelnut up on my buddies property. If you walked down the trail at night on got on the overlook on certain nights when the nuts were coming on you could actually hear the bears feeding on them, crunch....crunch....crunch. There is much to the old saw about being what you eat. After eating grass fed beef that is finished on grain I find corn fed beef smells funny, by comparison grass fed beef smells sweet, Calgary beef has fat that is white as snow and smells good. Corn fed beef like that from Kansas has an odd smell that turns me off, maybe its just me. I much prefer the flavor of mule deer to that of whitetail, probably due to the nature of mule deer to eat forbes, nibbling the tips off tender shoots of brush like red stemmed Ceanothus and the like. I could further pollute this thread by adding that after getting a good taste of smooth rye wiskey I don't care for sour mash by comparison, just personal preference. My grandfather used grain for his wiskey instead of corn, grain is what he had...straight grain wiskey, double run and cut with branch water.
 
Last edited:
We raised hogs and beef to eat. We grazed the beef critters on grass with a supplement of a large cup of feed most nights. We had horses cows chickens and geese and milk goats...oh and pea fowl(real pain). We took our farm raised grain to the local Southern States and had our feed mixed. Everything ate it...except the hogs. When we finished the cows off we usedcorn fom the Harvestor cracked it with a hammermill mixed some of our eveything feed and finished 'em off. Yellow in the front till it came out yellow in the back. We had hog feed ground with our grain...mostly corn & soybean meal. When they hit about 400 lbs we processed 'em. We did our own hams etc till the local hog killing died off. Never had a bad piece of meat. the hogs got all the leftover fruits and vegetables we grew...and everything drank the excess goats milk we had. We cooked the lard down in a big ol copper pot and made cracklings and sausage. Mostly gave the lard away but kept a 5 gal can...just for baking ya know
 
Folks have probably been frying dough since they learned to grind grain and make flour.
But the history of Indian or Navajo Frybread goes back to 1864.
‘ According to Navajo tradition, frybread was created in 1864 using the flour, sugar, salt and lard that was given to them by the United States government when the Navajo, who were living in Arizona, were forced to make the 300-mile journey known as the "Long Walk" and relocate to Bosque Redondo, New Mexico.’
That’s in Eastern NM near the town of Ft. Sumner.
Yes, that’s where Pat Garrett located Billy.
 
Late wife used to make pan bread. Guess it was biscuit like dough rolled out to fit in frying pan, cooked on very low heat on burner. Have to dig through her cook books for details…..
 
In New Mexico the Queen of Fried Bread is the Sopapilla.
Little Pillow in Spanish.
Similar to Fry Bread? Well yes.
Similar or same recipe.
But the dough is rolled and cut into squares, then fried.
Fry Bread is usually made from balls of dough pulled from the mixture.
Then hand stretched and flattened.
The first time my SIL, from Arkansas but then living in Louisiana, had Sopapillas, she said, these are just like Beignets!
They were first introduced in New Orleans by the French-Creole colonists in the 18th century. The concept is simple – dough is fried then covered with mounds of powdered sugar – but the result is extraordinary.
 
Crisco is still around. Good for pie crusts, pot pie dishes, etc., anything with a crust.

Faux lard. I'll take the rendered pig fat , thanks.

Crisco shortening contains the following ingredients:
Soybean oil
Fully hydrogenated palm oil
Palm oil
Mono and diglycerides
TBHQ
Citric acid (antioxidants)
 
Last edited:
Back
Top