Okay, before the recipe for AMAZINGLY EASY FRENCH FRIES, let me get something off my chest. For a long time my chief pet peeve when it came to restaurant skimping was when an establishment would give you a high quality napkin with your meal but then stock the table dispensers with flimsier, inferior napkins. Today that long-reigning peeve has been unseated by a newcomer: Ketchup hording.
Excuse me, but when exactly did restaurants start treating ketchup the way speakeasies treated moonshine? I'm aware that it's been going on for a while, but, perhaps since moving to the Midwest, I've started to notice it a lot more. When I was a lad, they positively drowned you in ketchup! You couldn't get out of a McDonalds or a Burger King without your pockets bulging with free ketchups. They'd practically follow you out into the street flinging little ketchup packets at you. You could get extra ketchup, ketchup to go, there were both pumps and packs of ketchup, and little cups of ketchup. Every house in New York City, where I grew up, had an ENTIRE kitchen drawer filled with packets of ketchup and soy sauce and duck sauce and that weird Chinese mustard that I've only ever seen my dad eat. And with rent being what it is in NY, those drawers probably amounted to about $180 in ketchup storage a month.
Nowadays, you practically have to give a secret password (hint: it's usually "swordfish") to get a half ounce of ketchup.
No one mentions ketchup. It's like the "secret" menu at In-N-Out
burger. If you don't know to ask for Animal Style, forget it! You ain't
gettin' Animal Style. And even when you do remember to ask for ketchup--which I
never do--the server seems to think "Oh crap! He KNOWS!" and then gets all coy with you:
"How many ketchups do you want?"
"How many? Um... how about a thousand! So I never have to do this again. Here, I brought a backpack."
You know who I blame for this increasing stinginess on the part of, not only restaurants, but corporations in general? That asshole who took the olives out of the airline salads. It's a pretty widely dispersed little bit of corporate lore, but if you haven't heard it, some person figured out that if American Airlines removed a single olive from each salad it served in first class, they would save $40,000 a year. Now, I grant you, this was a highly-quantifiable masterstroke of cost-cutting that probably killed it at the budget meeting. But the problem is, since the story made its way around the increasingly panicky boardrooms of corporate culture, every CFO and vice CFO and MBA and ladder-climbing ideas man has put forth his own theory on how Big Biz can offset costs by screwing the customer.
Look, Olive Remover, you pulled off a coup. Good job. But do you realize what you started? Do you realize that you're the reason we have to endure the extra step of declining a car wash before we're allowed the privilege of paying for our fuel and departing? Do you realize you're the reason our key chains are weighted down with supermarket membership cards that we have to swipe to save $0.13 on grapes? Do you realize you're the reason I have to feel like a jerk every time I explain to the 17-year-old twerp at Williams Sonoma that, no, I'd rather not supply my zip code?
So, Olive Remover Guy: I'm sure that little move looks incredible on
your resume. I'm sure you're living it up--traipsing the county with a hands free microphone grafted to your head, making zillions of dollars doing motivational speaking gigs and corporate seminars, but I also know this: You spend a lot of time on the road; You're probably forced to eat your fair share of fast food and olive-depleted airline salads. And I hope you die a tiny little death deep down inside each time you choke down another chalky, unketchuped French Fry.
STEAK FRITES!
Speaking of unketchuped French Fries, I busted out these last night! As regular readers will know, I get really psyched about making things that one usually only gets from restaurants. Things most people don't bother to make at home like calzones or falafel or General Tso's Chicken. To me, things like these are less foods you cooked, and more foods you wrought! The recipe I used for these fries came from Jeffery Steingarten via Joel Robuchon and it got a little tweak in the current ish of Cook's Illustrated Magazine. It claims to be an easy, hassle free method of turning out great fries at home, and guess what? It is! I try a lot of the recipes in CI and I'm often very pleased, but this is nothing less than the most useful and easiest recipe they've published in years. It's a better mousetrap, simple as that.
I decided to work on a French Fry recipe a few years ago and it turned out to be just that: Work. The fries were great but there was so much rinsing and drying and cooking and cooling and dusting and re-cooking and draining and leftover oil that the fries couldn't be served as a simple side dish. They were so labor-intensive I didn't have the energy to cook anything else, so we'd just have fries and salad for dinner. Now, there's nothing wrong with fries and salad for dinner, but it wasn't something I felt like firing up the diesel to make all that often.
What's great about the Robuchon/Steingarten/Cook's Illustrated recipe, as researched and written by Matthew Card, is that all you do is slice up some taters, plunk them in oil, and then take them out 25 minutes later. There's literally nothing else to it other than a sprinkle of salt. The key to the magic method is this: Instead of dunking raw fries into scalding hot oil for 3 or 4 minutes like they do in restaurants, you start the fries in cold oil and let them cook for 20-25 minutes. Allowing the taters and the oil come to frying temperature together gives the interiors a chance to cook and turn creamy before the outsides start to crisp. There is a rather tense period between, say, minutes 5 and 15 when the fries appear to be glomping together into a big ol' ball of nasty and you will want very badly to get in there with your tongs. But this is forbidden! You must not stir. You must not poke. You must not shake the pot. You must simply grit your teeth and ignore the fries until the 20 minute mark, whereupon you'll discover that they've sorted themselves out and can be stirred gently while they reach golden perfection. The recipe also calls for Yukon Gold potatoes rather than Russets because the higher starch content in the Russets made the fries turn out leathery during longer cooking. This is actually rather lucky for the simplicity-seeking chef because Yukons are so thin-skinned you don't even have to peel them.
So, let's review: A recipe for really good fries that involves minimum oil, no stirring, no monitoring and no peeling. In fact, there are really only three steps involved in the cooking: 1. Put fries in oil, 2. Leave, 3. Return and remove. Oh, and one more thing! The Cook's people thought that since the fries sat in the oil so long they might be higher in fat than normal fries so they sent them to a lab. They came back at 1/3 less greasy than a conventional fry! How? What? Why? They theorize it's because the slower cooking leaves more moisture in the fry and therefore there's less room for oil.
You know how you know these fries are really good? I'm not even going to talk about the wood fire-grilled steak and Argentine chimichurri sauce I served them with! How do you like them Earth Apples?
Fries:
2 large Yukon Gold potatoes cut into batons
enough peanut oil to just cover the potatoes
s/p
Place your batons in cold oil and turn heat to high. Leave. Return 15 minutes later, or when the fries have boiled for a few minutes and reduce heat to mediuim. Once fries start to separate gently poke them around with tongs or something. Fish fries out of oil and dump them into a paper grocery bag. Shake the bag a while to absorb excess oil, then toss the fries with sea salt. Boo. Ya.
Related:
My thoughts on home dry aging steaks
