[Sca-cooks] breaded vs. dredged? grilling dredged meat?

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Aug 29, 2006, at 12:13 AM, Stefan li Rous wrote:

> I guess I think of dredging as being used with flour while breading
> being more used with crumbs of some type.

In general, I agree, but you can also dredge in chopped nuts, oatmeal  
or cornmeal, or just about any small particulate, if that's the word...


> But "dredging" also gives
> me the impression of pushing something through the coating material
> and generally applying it thicker than simply "breading" it. So is
> there a methodology or a materials difference? or no difference at  
> all?

If it's coated with bread or an obviously breadlike coating, such as  
batter, by extension it is breaded. Floured objects, technically  
speaking, are floured, dredged with flour or coated with flour, but  
not breaded. I think perhaps you're being too literal-minded, with  
visions of people dredging the river bottom for the remains of Tom  
and Huck, in some of the rest of your thoughts on dredging. How  
thickly-coated an item becomes has a lot to do with the materials,  
whether there's liquid involved, and the technique.

> niccolo difrancesco commented:
>> Flour dredged and grilled would definitely be a
>> different critter from what I was envisioning.
>
> I can see coating with flour and then frying the item in an oil, but
> wouldn't putting a flour coated item onto a grill simply end up
> burning the flour coating rather than resulting in some kind of
> browned coating? Maybe this turns on the type of grill though. I'm
> thinking of an open, barred grill. If it's a flatiron type grill then
> I guess this might be different but unless there is fat turning into
> an oil, it still seems that you would simply end up with burned flour
> coating some somewhat cooked meat. So, what am I missing here?

I wondered about that myself, since you don't run across this  
technique all that often, generally speaking. You probably need a  
fairly gentle heat as compared to your more typical grilling/broiling  
-- this would me more like roasting, or even toasting. A little fat  
would help, too.

I am reminded of an experience I had just the other day: the Evil  
Spawn is still of an age where he still experiences the occasional  
sugar jones (only about 23 hours a day, now that he's more grown up),  
and he being the UUY teenager, it turned out that he had not been  
[effectively] taught how to properly roast or toast marshmallows. His  
idea was that you basically set them on fire, allow them to turn  
black, put out the fire and eat them. I'm like, "This is what's wrong  
with this generation: no patience and no taste!" So I showed him how  
to achieve (albeit over a gas flame, which is obviously Less Than  
Optimal) The Real Deal, a perfectly poufed-up, golden/russet pillow  
with only the occasional fleck of black (good pizza needs just a  
little of this, too). It was just one of those things most people  
don't give much conscious thought to, but it does help sometimes to  
pay attention to the little things and understand them...

Adamantius