Do you make French fries at home? They're a rare treat around here, but when that crispy yet tender texture is just right, they truly are one of the best foods imaginable. I learned something, though, about great fries at that potato seminar I attended a couple weeks ago. The real key to great fries is in the potato itself, and in something that happens to it before you even buy it...
The key to great French fries, explained chef Gary Danko, is the temperature that the potato has been stored at before cooking. See, for good French fries, the potato should be starchy. The starch is what gives you that tender, soft interior. But the colder you store potatoes, the more the starches will convert into sugars. And when the potato is stored below 40°F, the starch will convert into sugar rapidly.
I learned that the best French fry places control the process of potato sourcing from field to store. Restaurants who depend on fries, like Five Guys and other burger joints, have whole teams of people who control the temperature and starch of their potato stock before they arrive in the stores.
What's the takeaway for the home cook? If you're hoping to make French fries (or any sort of fried potato dish) at home, then ask your grocer if he knows how the potatoes were stored. Better yet, buy your potatoes at the farmers' market, since the grower should have a good idea of where the spuds were kept. In a heated shed? Outside in freezing temperatures?
And then, of course, don't refrigerate your potatoes, since that will certainly push them below 40 degrees.
Do you ever make fries at home? Any other good tips for getting a good result?
Related: Recipe: Beer-Battered Cajun Fries
(Image: Nealey Dozier)
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I am always surprised when I see grocery stores selling potatoes from the refrigerated bins. I ask the guys who stock the produce if they know that potatoes should not be chilled and they tell me that the directive comes from corporate!!!
Soaking, drying, then double frying = yummy french fries!
http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2010/05/perfect-french-fries-recipe.html
I followed this technique and it resulted in the best fries I have ever made. Yum!
When making french fries, you should always search for a Belgian recipe. I don't know if they actually originated here in Belgium, but we're certainly the masters of the true frites! How tiny a town may be, even if it's barely more than a fed streets, you can bet on it you'll find two things there: a church and a friterie, mostly operated from a camper or something. It's the first thing I eat when I get back from vacation: a large, pointy bag with fries and mayonnaise. Heaven!
Additionally, you probably know you have to bake frites twice, once on a relatively low temp (130-160 degrees celcius or about 320 degrees fahrenheit) and the second time on your (near) highest setting, 375 degrees fahrenheit or 190 degrees celcius. But what you may not know is that, for a truly traditional taste, we bake'm first in ossewit oil (I think it's some sort of ox fat), and then in regular arachid oil. The ox fat gives it a nice taste and the regular oil makes them crunchy. You gotta have two deep fryers though and most households in Belgium don't have that either. But that's how the friteries do it!
Oh, and gotta use Bintje-potatoes ofcourse, the real fry potato :-)
Yeah, to follow up @amaeb, just go read Kenji's article over at Serious Eats:
http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2010/05/the-burger-lab-how-to-make-perfect-mcdonalds-style-french-fries.html
EstherH -- they're fries, not frites. There is no difference in the cooking process between fries and frites. What you're doing would be like calling cheese fromage simply because it sounds fancier. It's silly.