The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [184]
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.
Arabian-Passard’s Optimum Fries
2 to 3 quarts of peanut oil (or substitute ⅓ to ½ beef tallow)
1 to 1¼ 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 ⅜ inch on a side. Discard the smallest and most irregular pieces. You should have between ¾ 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.
Just in the nick of time Nora Pouillon arrived home from Austria with six pounds of rendered horse fat carried in her suitcase next to her most intimate apparel. My excitement was difficult to restrain. There were seven white plastic containers, each labeled L. GUMPRECHT PFERDEFLEISCHERE. PFERDE-FETT. (Gumprecht is probably the most popular of Vienna’s remaining horse-meat sellers, and he occupies stands 58 and 59 at Vienna’s Naschmarkt.) Inside each was a white, congealed fat that resembled lard. Nora had glided through customs. One month later she was named 1996 U.S.A. Chef of the Year.
I poured the horse fat into one deep fryer, some home-rendered beef tallow into a second, and peanut oil into a third, and cooked ten batches of French fries, using the Arabian-Passard recipe. The peanut-oil version was good, but the beef- and horse-fat fries were exceptional, especially after I had diluted the animal fats by half with peanut oil. The potatoes were extraordinarily crisp and tasty, and they stayed that way much longer than usual. It is easy to see why McDonald’s and the other fast-food chains once cooked their famous fries in beef fat—until the public’s concern about cholesterol forced them to change to pure (though dangerously partially hydrogenated) vegetable