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How do French fries get really crispy? A test guide from the SRF 1 gastronomy expert.
The good news first: it doesn’t exist. Why? Because opinions differ when it comes to the first element: potatoes. There is the faction of the solid-cooking and the floury-cooking factions.
I like waxy potatoes. They remind me of my childhood, when I helped my father in the kitchen to make French fries for guests. Lesson number one: before frying potatoes, you have to wash them well in cold water and dry them. Drying them is important. Lesson number two: there are different ways to do this.
Dry therapy and fat question
Rub the traditional ones with a kitchen towel, dry them in the oven or in the air and sprinkle with rice flour. You can also dry fries in a chamber vacuum sealer, the device plays an indispensable role in the modernist kitchen. The dry fries would now traditionally be fried twice.
Pre-fry at 150 degrees, then let cool and then deep-fry at 190 degrees. Be careful, if you want to keep the acrylamide exposure low, stay below 170 degrees. After the second pass, the fries are removed from excess oil in a bowl lined with kitchen paper and seasoned with salt. Finito.
Legend:
Colourbox / Neirfy
So easy? Is not it! There are at least a thousand more possibilities and questions. The first would be the fat issue. Beef tallow or vegetable oil? I recommend a mix of both. Or, for those who bake their fries in the oven (at 180 degrees fan): olive oil. Have fun turning.
The crispy fight
The crispy battle for the “best” French fries has been going on since 1993. Celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal set out to revolutionize artisan fries this year. His “triple-cooked chips” went down in culinary history books, but they also sparked a competition for even more sophisticated methods that continues to this day.
For his “Triple-Cooked Chips” he boils the potato sticks in hot water, then dries them in a vacuum, then they are pre-fried at 130 degrees, then dried again in a vacuum and finally fried at 200 degrees. Voila. Have you already ordered the chamber vacuum sealer?
Ultrasonic crisper
You also need the part for the starch-infused ultrasonic French fries that the developer and author, Nathan Myhrvold, invented for his work “Modernist Cuisine”.
He also starts washing the fries. He then fills the potato sticks with salt and water into a vacuum bag and vacuum seals them. They are cooked in a vacuum bag, then drained, dried and vacuumed again, but this time with water and starch. This bag is then cavitated in an ultrasonic bath on both sides of the bag for 45 minutes and then drained again.
The potato sticks are now dried again in a vacuum and then – hallelujah – fried twice. First three minutes at 162 degrees, then three minutes at 190 degrees. You notice: If you want to produce the “best” French fries today, you don’t need a kitchen, you need a laboratory.