Getting Fries Right

“Eat a McDonald’s hamburger and you might be getting a mouth full of antibiotics, hormones, and dangerous bacteria.” The italics are mine. That’s from “What’s really in a McDonald’s hamburger?” by Robin Konie published at thatnkyourbody.com. The curious non-capitalized headline is theirs.

There was pink slime, but that’s either gone as an ingredient or renamed something like “pure real beef that we swear is organix” or something. “pure real…” should probably capitalized. It’s catching.

I think food fear mongering is funny. Mt Dew used to contain brominated vegetable oil. It doesn’t now because people accused Pepsi Co. of putting “flame retardant” in their sody pop even though they only used a meh 8 parts per million of the stuff when the FDA says up to 15 parts is fine. Never mind that Mt. Dew is a fire retardant, as anyone who’s ever doused a MORPG session ash tray fire can attest.

In 2014 there was a hubbub about Taco Bell, sawdust, and meat and it looks like Taco Bell was able to show that they don’t put sawdust into their food at all. That sets them apart. Cellulose is big these days. High fiber diets might be the unspoken bane of the rain forests. A disturbing amount of Parmesan cheese is made of sawdust (often referred to by the disarming “plant fibers,”) and I don’t mean a disturbing number of vendors use it. I mean a disturbing percentage of each bite of almost all non-DOC offerings. It’s in bread, natch, but it’s in salad dressing, tomato sauce, coffee creamer… it makes the ice cream creamy and the cone coniferous.

“Dosis sola facit venenum,” wrote Paraclesus, “The Father of Modern Toxicology,” in his Third Defense which I haven’t read but I’m sure I’ll get around to. “Only the dose makes the poison.” The most tedious food scare tactic is toxin shaming. “Hot dogs have eleven different toxins” or “That non-politically pure ice cream contains nine additives banned in Eritria!” Everything is toxic past a threshold. You can even die of hydro toxicity from an overdose of one widely used flame retardant.

If whatever I’m eating is below the scientifically determined threshold, it’s not a toxin. The snake oil “Not one! Not two! But Eleven!” sales pitch assumes I’m an idiot afraid because I don’t appreciate how many chemicals I’m not being harmed by. If something’s poisonous, I’d love to know. If something’s not, go away and let me enjoy my arsenic touched tuna.

Fast food is a devil because people who aren’t the person making the devilish observation don’t know how to moderate like the observer and make decisions the observer is sure they would never make if they knew as much as the observer. Therefore, fast food restaurants must be forced to pay their employees $15 an hour. Or something.

Fast food places are always under attack because other people like them. Witness the movie Super Size Me about the dangers of only eating at McDonalds and agreeing to buy everything that’s suggested you buy whenever a McDonald’s employee offers a further business exchange. The lesson is garbled, but it seems to be that idiots who eat only at McDonald’s and think McDonald’s Crew Team Members are down on their luck nutritionists working through a rough patch will have health problems and so the rest of us should not eat there.

If you eat only white fish, turkey, mushrooms, and treat yourself to an occasional bowl of egg noodles you’ll get scurvy. Your teeth will fall out. Your hair will get frizzy. You’ll start hemorrhaging internally for a bit, but then all your scar tissue will break down and old wounds will reopen so all those internal hemorrhages find the light of day by gushing out your once healed appendectomy cut. Nobody says stop eating white fish and mushrooms.

Instead of getting credit for making tasty treats and exporting queues and clean bathrooms, fast food places get blamed for clearing the Amazon, obesity, and pink slime. For the scold who’s just starting out, they’re a pre-made villain. Other people have already done the heavy blame shifting. Swaths of the public are willing to act surprised when you pull back the covers, revealing that inexpensive hamburgers are made from inexpensive beef. They’ll give you an approving nod when you bravely point out that soft drinks contain corn syrup. It’s a fait accompli. Just don’t go after the fries.

Work at it sideways. Rail against the evils of trans fats in print. If you must speak about them, enunciate. Be sure people hear the “fats.” Just don’t try to demonize French Fries directly because you can’t. If Fast Food does one thing well – they do more than that, but for argument’s sake – it’s French fries and people love them. You could prove incontrovertibly that McDonald’s fries are made from the cloned flesh of their dead childhood pets and folk’d shrug. No one cares so long as they get some. Fast Food has mastered the art. Let it go.

It’s possible to make fantastic fries at home, even ones comparable to the clown’s. They’re just not fast.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Nero Wolfe’s forty-five minute eggs. They were delicious and I’m glad I tried the recipe, but I’m not likely to make them again anytime soon. These fries are similarly labor intensive and I don’t cook them all that often, but when I have the time and inclination, I’m always glad I did.

Did you know that the Belgians have a better claim to French fries than the French?

Proper French Fries

• 4 large Russet potatoes
• distilled white vinegar
• vegetable oil
• salt

I learned to make good fries from a chef I used to work with here in Birmingham. I’ve mentioned him before and I’ll likely do so again because he was a details guy (the expansive use of the term “grip” as a measurement aside) and fun.

From him I learned to draw off excess starch with a water bath after the fries were cut; they brown too quickly if you don’t. He taught me to cook twice. Heat hits the outside of the fry and spreads toward the middle, so the outside always has more time at cooking temperature than the inside. If you wait till the heat gets to the middle, pull them out, put them in the freezer to stop the cooking process as best you can, and then put them back in the oil, the whole process starts over. The outside cooks even more in relation and the result is a crispy product.

For the most part, his method worked, but there were inconsistencies. Sometimes I’d end up with half cooked or overcooked middles.

Three or four years ago I bought The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. If you don’t already have it, buy it. He’s a tinkerer and tireless. He’ll wonder if salting too soon or too late affects steak so he’ll salt a whole bunch at one time and cook them off at ten minute increments, recording the differences and explaining the chemical interactions over time. Stuff like that. It’s fascinating and at almost one thousand pages long, full of recipes. Where many teach a man how to cook a fish, he teaches what happens when you cook a fish and how to apply what you learned going forward. It’s well worth your time.

He notes that McDonald’s spent a ton of money figuring out how to perfect the fry. They found that pectins are the key and the best way to enervate pectins in fries is to midwife pectin methylesterase by holding the fries in a pre-fry water bath at 170°for fifteen minutes. Any hotter and your midwifing efforts are for naught. The problem is that not many home cooks can hold a water bath at 170° at all, much less for fifteen minutes.

As I said, Lopez-Alt is a tinkerer. He recalled a previous series of experiments and made a clever leap. Trying to perfect apple pie he noted that tart apples hold their shape when cooked and sweeter apples don’t. His solution to the home cook pectin fry was not to figure out how to hit and hold 170° at home, but to change the acidity of the water bath so that potatoes, whose cells go through the same or a very similar process when cooked as apples, stay firm. He added vinegar.

Lopez-Alt is brilliant. He’s also very precise. I’m not. If the two of us shared a kitchen you’d find my corpse riddled with whatever common kitchen implement cause the most prolonged pain with the least post murderous rage clean-up required. What I’m showing here works – I’ve done it a dozen times – but you really should buy his book and check out the way he makes “Thin and Crispy French Fries” (pg. 910, but start reading at pg. 904 to get the full experience.)

Peel the potatoes and cut them into ¼” to ½” thick batons. Boil enough water to cover the fries and add a couple of glugs, about 2 tbsps., of vinegar. Put the fries in the water and boil for 10 minutes.

Pat dry and let cool, about 10 – 15 minutes.

I like to fry in a wok, but a Dutch oven or deep skillet will work. If you have a fry daddy, don’t brag when a smug look of superiority would suffice. Heat enough vegetable oil to cover to between 385° to 400°.

Add a third of the yet unfried fries to the oil and stir here and there until the outside goes from off white to pale glossy off yellow. Lopez-Alt would have already killed me for not caring all that much how thick the fries are, so I don’t worry too much about not giving a cooking time.

Cook the remaining batches but allow the oil to get back up to 385° to 400° between each.

After the first fry take the oil off heat and allow the resting fries to cool completely. Room temperature is fine, but I put mine in the freezer for 30 minutes minimum to completely stop the cooking process. Overnight would be ideal. Ice crystals burst dramatically into steam when cooked and make for a fluffy interior. If you want to divide into portions and Ziploc them, they’ll keep for a month or two in the freezer so ready for final step French fries will be at hand whenever the urge strikes.

Heat the oil up again and add the fries in familiar batches. Frozen fries are going to drop the oil temperature precipitously. Remember to bring the temperature back up between batches.

Again, I go for color; golden with a few browned is my goal; 3 – 4 minutes.

Toss in a bowl with salt and you’re good.

It’s a bit of a slog and I usually have fries with sandwiches or burgers so this method is out of synch with the non-fussy main course I want to serve it with. There’s a Bar BQ place nearby and I can send my son to pick up a few orders of really impressive fries when I start making burgers and he’s back by the time I’m pulling them off the grill.

But these are so good. Every once in a while, I want them and I’m never disappointed. I have a sixteen year-old to do the messy clean up.

This isn’t POETS Day, but when I was surfing through sites looking at food toxins and flame retardants I came across a post about The Poison Squad. In 1902 scientists assembled gluttons to eat food laced with varying amounts of additives and kept a log of their tummy aches. Somehow this morphed into the FDA. There were steps in between.

Dr. Harvey Wiley (1844-1930), one of the squad minders, wrote a poem:

Oh, maybe this bread contains alum and chalk,
Or sawdust chopped up very fine,
Or gypsum in powder about which they talk,
Terra alba just out of the mine.
And our faith in the butter is apt to be weak,
For we haven’t a good place to pin it
Annato’s so yellow and beef fat so sleek,
Oh, I wish I could know what is in it?”

Enjoy.