Chips (not crisps)
"Proper chips should be thick cut and defiantly potatoey: golden to the eye, hot and fluffy within." Felicity Cloake
The picture is of Heston Blumenthal's three times fried chips - the ultimate apparently. And they certainly do look the part. I will come to them again later.
I feel a bit diffident about this post as, during my limited research of the subject, I found that, even more than usual, it's all been said before. So how to put a new slant on the whole topic? Quick answer - there will be no new slant.
Somehow or other in the last few days chips have come up here and there, so much so, that when I knew we were going to a Greek restaurant for our granddaughter's birthday celebrations, I thought I would have something with chips - preferably fish - and I did, but as it turned out - with gyros. They were good. These days I rarely have chips - they are so so bad for you - in every conceivable way - from the potatoes themselves, through the fat they are cooked in to the salt you sprinkle over them. But is there anyone who does not like chips? They say that in Britain 87% of the population like chips - but do the 13% who say they don't, really not like them or just don't eat them. Even Gwyneth Paltrow - one of those eat healthy missionaries says her weakness is BBQ chips - although I guess she is talking of the other kind - crisps to my mind. Still unhealthy though, for the same reasons.
So let me reaffirm as an aside that this post is not about crisps. Another time perhaps. Here in Australia and America too apparently they call what I know as crisps, chips. I find it really, really confusing because there is no satisfactory term for what I call chips. Crisps are the very thinly sliced potatoes, fried, and cooled and sold in packets. Very unhealthy snack food. As a child it was a treat that we were given when we went on our rural rides into the Essex countryside. My mother and father would stop at some picturesque village pub on a village green and we children would be brought a lemonade each and a packet of Smith's crisps - which included a little blue paper twist of salt that you sprinkled over the chips. I loved them then and I still do, but I never buy them (too addictive) and I'm not talking about them here. I am talking about the many varieties of the fish and chip kind of chip. What I know as a chip.
“Without question, the humble fried potato, the chip, is a gastronomic phenomenon in itself. The ability potatoes have to get mega crispy on the outside and super-fluffy in the middle when cooked is so good. Skinny and shoestring fries are delicious, but a proper fat handcut chip is something else." Jamie Oliver
Another childhood treat - consumed much more frequently, was fish and chips - either from the fish and chip shop or cooked at home. If it was from the shop it came wrapped in newspaper and doused with malt vinegar and salt. So very British. I don't think anyone else does the vinegar. Poor food in poor wrapping. Because it was a cheap meal. But I won't get diverted on to fish and chips here - I'm trying to concentrate on the chips.
It has to be said that these fish and chip shop chips were often soggy - at least by the time you got them home. Though we often warmed them up in the oven which also crisped them up a bit too. But my mother made them the right way - and these were consumed immediately and were therefore crisp. Rinse them of their starch and fry them twice is the mantra. And as usual, if you want to know how to cook them go to Felicity Cloake. I too used to cook them. Part of the set of saucepans I was given as a wedding present was a chip fryer - well it was a saucepan with a wire basket that fit inside it. You had to get the fat really hot which is why it is a really dangerous thing to have. Apparently in England the fire brigade attends a house fire caused by hot deep fat frying at least once a day. These days, of course, you can buy electric deep fat fryers, which may well be safer. I don't know because I don't have one. And you can also get air fryers - which I think I may have looked at in the past. And we now all know how unhealthy fried chips are and so we are encouraged to bake them instead. Which I have tried, but as Felicity Cloake says, they really aren't like chips, they're more like a different shaped roast potato. Delicious in their own way, but not chips.
You can also avoid the issue of deep frying by buying frozen chips of course and then just heating them up in the oven. I confess I have never tried them so I am not absolutely sure that this is what you do. Maybe you refry them too. They certainly come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes. A quick look at Coles website came up with at least a dozen different varieties. And one of them - to my horror - was battered chips, which it seems to me compounds the unhealthiness of the whole thing even more.
It's actually pretty difficult to make the perfect chip - at least if you read the articles on the subject. It's not a simple process, even if you do have only two basic ingredients - potatoes and fat.
"for the perfect chip, you need a floury potato, a hard fat of your choice – and the patience to allow your chips to chill out between stages." Felicity Cloake
By hard fat she means lard - really not at all healthy!!! Probably a historical thing as this is what the British used to use. Now they mostly use a vegetable oil of some kind. And I think really good French fries as made in France, may well be fried in olive oil. It is true that different oils can have a very different effect and Felicity Cloake did seem to think they tasted better when cooked in a hard fat.
"the wrong potato will result in a guaranteed failure." Paul Bloxham
The potato variety I found being recommended is not one we have here in Australia, so I have no idea what to recommend - a floury one though, not a yellow one. Kipflers don't cut it as a chip. And as for Heston and his ultimate chip - achieved after months of experimentation and analysis:
"The first secret is cooking the chips until they are almost falling apart as the cracks are what makes them so crispy. The second secret is allowing the chips to steam dry then sit in the freezer for an hour to get rid of as much moisture as possible. The final secret is to cook the chips in very hot oil for a crispy, glass-like crust." Heston Blumenthal
So basically it's all too hard and best to confine your chip eating - for you really shouldn't do it too often, to visits to restaurants, where they will probably cook them much better than you could.
A final word on the British and American kind of chip. I gather there is a popular with some, derided by others, fashion of stacking square chips 'jenga' style. It comes from a child's game of stacking pieces of wood until they fall down. These do not look at all tempting to me.
And finally there is the potato wedge - most often accompanied by something to dip them in. More fluffy, hot potato inside I guess. And they often have the skins left on and can be dipped in something herbal and spicy as well, before cooking. Although another way of adding the spice is to add it to the oil. At least this is how one London restaurant does it. Potato wedges seem a more American thing to me though.
But the story of chips does not end there. For most of us, these days, actually consume French fries rather than chips - most notably from McDonalds and the like.
I don't think they are made from scratch at McDonald's but are bought in bulk, ready frozen to be finished off in store. I gather originally they used to be sprayed with a sugar solution too. French fries are called French fries because France is where they originated (or was it Belgium? - there is a bit of a war about this) - back in the 17th - or was it 18th century? If you want to read more on this you can try Wikipedia or the Today I Learnt ... blog - the latter covering most of the bases really. And certainly the French do cut their chips much thinner than the British, at home and in restaurants. I guess whether you prefer thick cut or thin cut is a matter of taste. Or can you taste the difference? Is there enough fluffy potato in the interior of the French fry?
And the last word should perhaps go to Moules et Frites - perhaps the national dish of France - followed closely by Biftek et Frites. Mussels and chips do not seem a compatible partnership to me, but absolutely everywhere you go in France you will see Moules et Frites on offer. They use the denuded shell to pick up the chips which I reckon is fairly nifty.
Whichever you prefer - french fries or british chips it has to be admitted that they are addictive. You can't eat just one. So the best you can do, for they are really, really, unhealthy, is to eat them rarely and lash out and eat some really good ones from a trusted source. Tasmania does them very well I seem to remember.
