Review: FryAway

I love making fried chicken. It's one of my favorite special occasion foods and one that people get excited about, practically guaranteeing dinner guests arrive in a good mood.

I don't love getting rid of fry oil though. Every step of the process feels like an opportunity to make a big mess. While Seattle, where I live, offers several disposal options–in the garbage, in the city compost, or in containers next to the trash—each has its own hurdle.

Perhaps as a result, my ears perked up when, through WIRED friends The Spoon, I heard of a cooking oil solidifier called FryAway. Not the sexiest thing, I know, but practical. It looks a bit like shredded coconut and feels a bit like a fatty soap, and it essentially promised to turn my Dutch oven into a Jell-O mold for french-fry oil, thus making it easier to dispose of used oil.

"The last thing you want to deal with is a sewer overflow or sewage backup in your home," says Marie Fiore, a strategic communications coordinator for the King County Wastewater Treatment Division in Washington state, before stating a refrain I'd hear again and again in the following days: "Don't pour your cooking oil down the drain."

I figured a product like this would be a hit among the folks I would interview for this review, and it was almost comical how each one stopped the conversation to make Fiore's last point clear.

Speaking with Fiore also gave me a childhood flashback wherein my dad and his friends tried blowing a clog through our house pipes using an air compressor. It was a long time ago, and I have no clue how they came up with this strategy, but I think the idea was to blow the pipes clear. Everybody was assigned a drain to stuff closed in order to build pressure, but nobody remembered the vent above the kitchen, leading to what has since been referred to as the “banana peels on the roof incident.”

In a related vein, Fiore went on to say in a sort of shook voice how she had "first-hand visuals" of a fatberg—a giant sewer and stormwater drain clog made of cooking oil and other fats along with wipes and diapers people have mindlessly jettisoned out of view. "Those things need to be removed by hand," she said, leaving me to imagine the sheer disgustingness of that task. "Please tell your readers flushable wipes aren't flushable!"

It was a clever, fear-of-God way to underline the importance of finding good ways to dispose of cooking oil, and it gave me a promising feeling as testing began.

Since the founder of FryAway said she got the idea for it from similar Japanese products, I started with pork katsu, shallow fried in about a quarter inch of oil. Once I'd cooked all the pork, I sprinkled some flakes of FryAway into the hot oil and stirred it. As I ate the delicious katsu, the oil in the pan cooled and solidified into a semi-rubbery disc at the bottom of the pan. From there, I could scrape the whole thing into the garbage or put it in the city yard-waste bin.

It was a good-feeling solution for that amount of oil—not enough to pour into a container, but too much to wipe up with a paper towel or two.

There's a little bit to learn to make FryAway work, but it's easy to get used to. Those shredded-coconut-style flakes need to be stirred into oil that's still hot enough to melt them. The trickiest part is figuring out how much to use. Currently, FryAway comes in a few different sizes—ketchup-style packets for different amounts of oil, or, loose in a 200-gram pouch with a little scoop, where every scoopful (about 9 grams) solidifies one cup of oil. Eyeballing how much cooking oil is in the bottom of a pot or pan is not easy, but I started measuring out how much fresh oil I poured in there and slowly got better at it. I found I liked the scoop method (which the company calls Super Fry) the best by far.

After that, one of the trickiest things to figure out is the smartest, most earth-friendly way to dispose of the solidified oil. In Seattle, if you can wipe it up with a paper towel or two, it can go in the compost bin for food and yard waste. If you can get it into a closed container or bag (ew!), you can put it in the garbage. Or you can put up to 2 gallons in labeled containers and set them out next to the trash bins. I usually opt for the latter option if I'm using that much oil and can come up with an appropriately sized container. (For what it's worth, I contacted some folks at Seattle Public Utilities who said the "best option" was liquid oil in a container, as that is converted into biodiesel. "Good options" followed, including putting small amounts into the city-provided compost bin, or in a container in the garbage. Just don't pour it into the sink. As a city rep put it to me, "No one wants their sewage back.")

To learn more about disposing of cooking oil, I spoke with University of Washington researcher Sally Brown, a specialist in "finding value in urban wastes, including what you flush and what you toss." Put another way, she gives a lot of thought to the disposal of fats, oil, and grease, collectively known as FOG.

"Cooking oil has a lot of value, but disposing of it and putting that value in the right place is a pain in the butt," she says. The “value” she’s referring to is what we typically think of as energy.

While Brown warns against putting cooking oil into backyard compost, which sounds like a holy mess, she recommends disposing of it in a commercial composting facility like Seattle's "yard waste" bins, where, as she says, "a gallon of cooking oil will be a drop in the bucket."

Putting it in the garbage, however, is bad.

"By landfilling, you actually cause harm rather than realize any good. In a compost pile, you avoid making methane that can get released and instead make soil," which she calls a good deal. "Ideally, you'd take the oil to an anaerobic treatment plant, but that's not something most of us are going to do."

As she talks, I realize I'm still not sure what I'd do with my solidified oil.

"It brings your cooking oil into margarine form, a solid like Crisco. You don't get the spreadability, but that's not what they're going for," she says in a joking tone. I can also somehow imagine her looking at a tub of oil in her kitchen that she needs to deal with. "Well, if the product makes better disposable doable, that's wonderful."

Photograph: FryAway

After speaking with Brown, I kept frying things: salt and pepper shrimp, smothered pork chops, even fish and chips. Slowly, I came up with a better plan for how to get rid of cooking oil in Seattle, and when I'd incorporate FryAway. For large quantities (up to 2 gallons), I'd continue to try to put it in labeled containers so it could be converted to biodiesel—no FryAway used, unless I didn't have containers. For typical sauté quantities, I'd just wipe the pan out with a paper towel and put it in city compost without FryAway. For shallow-fry quantities, which are too much for paper towels and too little to put in a container, I'll use FryAway and put the solidified oil in the city compost. Your solution will depend on where you live and what the local disposal options are. If I lived somewhere where the only option was to throw it in the trash, I'd likely use FryAway (or something like it) for anything but quantities I could wipe up with a paper towel.

The other thing I tried to do was cook with the oil more than once, or as Brown might say, more fully capture its value. After all, she said, "if you use it twice you need half as much."

This made me think back to the years I lived in Barcelona, where, if I may generalize, they don't do as much out-and-out fried food (like fries) as we do in the United States, but are more prone to cook a pound or two of sliced potatoes and onions in a couple cups of oil over medium heat for a Spanish tortilla. What surprised me was how people would have dinner, then pour the used cooking oil into a container near the stove to be used again and again. If that seems weird, think about the Fryalators at your favorite burger joint; it's not like they're changing the oil out after every batch of onion rings.

"We might use oil four or five times," said my old friend and Barcelona native Carme Gasull, a food writer and screenwriter on a new cooking show called Menu(dos) Torres. "We'll make fries, croquettes, tortillas …"

"How do you know how long to keep it?" I asked on a video call, and she gestured to her eyes and nose.

"With potatoes, the oil stays pretty clean, but with croquettes, it goes faster," she says, referring to ingredients like bread crumbs, flour, and cheese in the latter which might flake off, fall to the bottom of the pan, and slowly crud up the oil. "If you use it too long, you can tell."

The reuse of cooking oil is so ingrained into life in Barcelona that the city provides cooking-oil recycling containers, which can be filled up and swapped out for empty ones at recycling centers.

"Every Wednesday, a truck comes to our neighborhood for a few hours and we can bring stuff like used cooking oil, clothes, and electronics to it for recycling," she says.

While I'm glad Seattle has different options for disposing of cooking oil, I really liked having FryAway around, particularly for midsize jobs that were too much for a paper-towel wipe up and not enough to stick in a gallon container. However, its usefulness will depend on what you cook and what the disposal options are where you live. We might not all have little trucks that show up in our neighborhood and cart our oil away, but at the very least, FryAway gives us one more reason not to pour oil down the drain. It may even help keep the banana peels off our roofs.