The Man Who Ate Everything (53 page)

Neither Dr. N. T. Oliver nor Fannie Farmer, in the first edition of
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book,
published two years later, uses the double-frying technique, which first appears in an American cookbook in 1906. To understand the virtues of double-frying, cut up a potato into French-fry-sized strips, dry them with paper towels, and fry them at a steady 360 degrees Fahrenheit until they become golden brown. Either the outsides will be tough and dark or the insides will taste and feel undercooked. The reason is that potatoes have a very high “thermal inertia.” It takes a long time for heat to penetrate and cook to the center of the potato. And by the time it does, the outside gets overdone. When potatoes are fried twice, the interior gets cooked in the relatively cool first frying of five or more minutes—but before the outside can color and seal. Then the surface is made brown and crisp by plunging the potatoes into very hot oil. The crust quickly becomes impermeable to oil and remains no more than a half millimeter thick.

Cooking the inside means both evaporating a good part of the water (potatoes are 70 percent to 80 percent water) and gelatinizing the starch—causing the hard, microscopic starch granules that line the potato cells to absorb water and swell into puffy, tender, fragile pillows filled with gooey, wet starch. Gelatinization starts when the pieces of potato are heated to about 150 degrees
Fahrenheit and is complete when the very heart of each French fry reaches 170 to 180 degrees.

That’s it, in theory at least. Yet every French chef seems to have his or her own special method. The possibilities are endless. What variety of potatoes is best? Should they be peeled and, if so, with a knife or a vegetable peeler? Should they be cut irregularly by hand or into perfect strips with a machine? Should the strips be patted dry with a towel, or washed first, or soaked in ice water, or blanched in boiling water? How many fryings are ideal, in what fat or oil, and at what temperatures? If two fryings are good, would four be better? How much time should elapse between fryings? What kind of salt should you sprinkle on them?

The towering Joel Robuchon, long considered the greatest chef in the Western world, recommends a potato variety called Agria, likes slightly irregular hand-cut shapes, blanches his potato strips in
unsalted boiling water
for two minutes, fries them in peanut oil at 320 degrees Fahrenheit, waits a few minutes, immerses them again at 374 degrees for two minutes, and seasons them “deeply” with fine salt and then with coarse salt, for the crunch of it. He prefers the gray salt of Guerande, from Brittany. Fries may be considered plebeian food in this country, not worthy of a great chef, but in France and Belgium nobody shares our disrespectful attitude. “Ah, les frites!” writes Robuchon. “I know nobody who does not go nuts in front of a plate of crispy French fries.”

The great Belgian chef Pierre Wynants likes Bintje potatoes. He washes the potatoes, uses huge amounts of oil, and lets the fries cool for at least a half hour between the two fryings. Ghislaine Arabian, born in Belgium, raised in Lille, and now chef at Ledoyen in Paris, supports a potato called Charlotte de Noir-moulier and the Belgian combination of palm oil and 15 percent beef tallow, quite a low temperature for the first bath, no delay, and then a high temperature for the second.

And a friend in Paris has disclosed to me what he swears is the great Joel Robuchon’s personal, simplified home recipe, which achieves what amounts to two fryings (or, really, an infinite number) in one because the potatoes start in cold oil, which is heated gradually but as quickly as possible to 370 degrees Fahrenheit. Commercial frying manuals typically advise you to use large amounts of oil—at least six times the weight of the food to be cooked—so that its temperature will “recover” quickly when cold potatoes are plunged into it. But with Robuchon’s home method, heat recovery is not an issue because both potatoes and oil start out cold and are heated together. So Robuchon begins with only enough cold oil to cover the potatoes; little oil makes for faster heating. These fries are much less expensive and much less messy than the classical version. To my knowledge this recipe has not previously been published, anywhere.

This bewildering variety of recipes, the excellence of Cesare Casella’s Tuscan fries, the private formula of Joel Robuchon—all these shook me to the core. I began a profound reevaluation of my own French-frying skills and dared to ask the most probing questions of which a French-fry lover is capable: What is a true French fry, and how is it made?

I gathered one hundred pounds of potatoes, ten gallons of peanut oil, four electric deep fryers, and a sheaf of scientific books and papers, and went to work, all the while hoping for the arrival of my horse fat, if Nora Pouillon ever returned from Austria, land of the Lipizzaners. I will not dwell on the details of every experiment. Let us just say that my work with rendered beef fat was the last straw. My wife becomes unaccountably grumpy when our loft reeks like a Burger King and she goes to work with her hair smelling like a steak. Things grew tense between us.

Here are my most stunning findings:

1. I compared several potato varieties cooked the same way. Fries made from starchy Idaho russets were typically the crispest, though often unpleasantly granular inside and with a bitter taste, compared with fries made from large white boiling or all-purpose potatoes, which were more tender, both inside and out, and sweeter tasting. (Boiling potatoes take thirty seconds to a minute longer to fry.) Very waxy, yellow specimens fried dark, soft, and excessively sweet on the inside, though extremely creamy in texture.

2. I tested several automatic electric fryers—two from DeLonghi, one from T-Fal, and my old Bosch (no longer available in the United States; it required all my cleverness to repair it), plus a manual French stove-top six-quart pan with a frying basket from Bridge Kitchenware in New York City. None of the electric deep fryers had accurate thermostats, but all worked tolerably well when a frying thermometer was immersed in the oil and a sharp eye was kept on the temperature. The DeLonghi Roto-Fryer, the most expensive, handsome, and solidly made, operates on the crazy principle that putting an angled, motorized basket inside the fryer to rotate the potatoes in and out of the fat not only saves on oil but also produces the crispest surface and lightest texture, which it most surely does not. The thermostat in the cheaper DeLonghi was off by as much as forty degrees Fahrenheit. Its consumer help line was busy for an entire day; I called every thirty seconds for ten hours through the magic of automatic redial. The T-Fal was well enough designed and efficient, and produced fine French fries, though it lacked the power or capacity of either my old Bosch or my stove-top pan and basket, plus thermometer. If I needed an electric deep fryer, I would choose the T-Fal. Otherwise, stick to a large pan and basket.

3. I tested all the brands of microwave French fries I could find in two supermarkets. None was satisfactory. She who invents the perfect microwave French fry will become the richest woman in the world. (Americans pay five billion dollars a year to consume five billion pounds of fries.) Several companies have gone broke in the attempt.

4. I tested all the brands of “oven-fries” I could find. None was better than barely palatable.

5. Frozen French fries come in many shapes and sizes. All have been par-fried in the factory and instruct you to finish them at home by deep-frying, baking, broiling, or even microwaving. Only deep-frying yielded acceptable results. Of all the brands, shapes, and sizes, only Ore-Ida’s Shoestrings (about three-sixteenth-inch square when fully cooked, like McDonald’s) gave good results; their texture was excellent, their taste less so. No brand was acceptable when cooked in the oven, under the broiler, or in the microwave. They were not French fries.

6. Most American cookbooks have you soak cut-up Idaho potatoes in ice water for at least a half hour, and sometimes overnight. This practice did not produce superior fries; but it does allow you to prepare your potatoes way in advance.

7. Washing the potatoes after cutting them is unnecessary. It does not make for crisper fries, as many recipes claim.

8. Blanching the potato strips—plunging them into boiling water for two minutes or more, as many good French cooks and cookbooks advise—is unnecessary with the starchy potatoes we use in this country or even with all-purpose or boiling potatoes. The goal of blanching is to remove sugar from the surface of the strips, making for lighter-colored fries; to stop enzyme activity in the surface, which would otherwise cause browning as soon as the potato is cut and the formation of unpleasant flavors later; and to gelatinize and seal the starch on the surface, decreasing oil absorption and making for crispier fries with a thicker crust. Waxy, lower-starch potatoes of the kind they use in France may require this assistance, but an Idaho-Burbank does not, unless it has been improperly stored at very low temperatures just above freezing so that lots of sugar has developed in the potato.

9. Raw potato strips will absorb more fat if their surfaces are moist. Dry them carefully.

10. French fries get soggier faster after you have sprinkled salt on them. Salt them only in the last seconds before serving.

11. French chefs disagree about how long you should wait between the first frying and the second. Letting the potatoes cool to room temperature for an hour or two between fryings seems to make Idaho potatoes come out crisper in the end, but has little effect on waxier potatoes.

12. The color of French fries, ranging from golden to darker brown, is not a good indicator that the potatoes are ready. The chief cause of color is the sugar level of the potato, which varies according to how it was stored and what variety it was in the first place. Taste your French fries to tell if they are done.

13. The best combination of times and temperatures is a long, cool frying followed by a short, hot frying at the end, with little waiting in between. This and many of my other findings are consistent with the recipes of both Ghislaine Arabian and Alain Passard. Though they use fancy potatoes and special animal fats, their methods seem to work best even with supermarket tubers and peanut oil. Both learned their fries in Belgium.

Easy
Frites

Attributed to Joel Robuchon

1
¹
/2 pounds Idaho or boiling potatoes

2 cups peanut oil, at room temperature

Salt

Wash and peel the potatoes, and with a French-fry cutter or a kitchen knife, cut them into long strips with a square cross section about 3/8 inch on a side. Wash them briefly under cold water and dry with a cloth. Put them into a pan about 10 inches in diameter with sides at least 4 inches high. Just cover with peanut oil.

Place the pan over the highest heat. When the oil has exceeded 200° f., it will begin to bubble, first softly and then furiously, and by the time it reaches 350° f., the potatoes will be a deep golden brown and ready to eat. (Make sure that the oil temperature never exceeds 370° F.)

Taste one or two. Drain and blot with paper towels. Salt the frites just before serving. Eat with strong Dijon mustard.

Arabian-Passard’s Optimum Fries

2 to 3 quarts of peanut oil (or substitute 1/3 to
1/2
beef tallow)

1 to 11/4 pounds Idaho Russet-Burbank or large white
boiling potatoes

Salt

Pour the peanut oil into an electric deep fryer or a six-quart stove-top deep-frying pan fitted with a wire basket. Use as much oil as the manual of the electric deep fryer recommends (or up to half the volume of the stove-top version, i.e., three quarts). Using a frying thermometer, bring the oil to 265° F.

Meanwhile, wash and peel the potatoes, and with a French-fry cutter or a kitchen knife, cut them into long strips with a square cross section about 3
/8
inch on a side. Discard the smallest and most irregular pieces. You should have between
³
/4 and 1 pound of potatoes (3 to 4 cups). Use the smaller amount with two quarts of peanut oil and the larger amount with three quarts. Do not wash the potatoes, but dry them carefully in a kitchen towel. Keep them wrapped tightly until the oil is ready.

Put the potatoes into the frying basket and lower it into the oil. Cook over high heat until the oil nears 260° F. again, then lower the heat to maintain that temperature. Stirring often with a long cooking fork, cook for 9 or 10 minutes, until the potatoes are nearly cooked on the inside but are white and somewhat translucent on the outside and have not yet taken on color. Lift the basket and drain the potatoes while the oil reaches 370° F. to 380° F., again over the highest heat. Do not let the oil exceed 380° F.

Plunge the frying basket back into the oil and fry for about 3 minutes, until the potatoes are deeply golden and crisp. All-purpose or boiling potatoes take about 30 seconds longer to cook.

Lift the frying basket, drain the potatoes for a few moments, invert the basket onto a plate covered with paper towels, blot the top of the pile of fries, and, just before serving, salt them without stinting.