The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [182]
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 Noirmoulier 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 Joël 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 Joël 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.
Easy Frites
Attributed to Joël Robuchon
1½ 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 ⅜ 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