Real French Fries
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We had Steak Frites tonight. Wow — was it good! I got the steaks (grass-fed) from Rocky Canyon at the farmer’s market this morning. They were melt-in-your-mouth delicious.
I served the meal with Lillet Blanc (a French apertif that tastes like orange) on ice, watered down with a little Pellegrino and a slice of orange. Yum! Exactly the perfect drink when it’s sweltering hot outside and you don’t have air conditioning.
Not to toot my own horn, but this dinner was seriously amazing. The only thing that would have made it better would have been chocolate ice cream. (Next time, for sure!)
I know, I know, potatoes are not on GAPS. But Seth has been doing so well, we figured we’d give it a try. I have a feeling he’s going to do fine with it.
Seth said the fries tasted like In & Out (I think they were better). I fried them in beef tallow (which I rendered a few weeks ago from beef fat, also from Rocky Canyon).
The trick to French fries is you have to either cut them and then soak them in water (in the fridge) for 12 hours (or overnight) — or you have to parboil them (boil for 2 minutes). I did a combination of the two — soaked in water for 8 or 9 hours (I didn’t read the recipe far enough ahead of time) and then parboiled just for be on the safe side. Soaking and/or parboiling helps to prevent soggy fries. It seemed to work — my fries came out crisp.
(I followed the recipes from The Balthazar Cookbook for both the fries and the Steak Frites. They recommend soaking in water for 12 hours. I read online that you can simply parboil — I’ll try that next time.)
I was reading about French fries this afternoon — here are some things I learned:
The taste of a french fry is largely determined by the cooking oil. For decades McDonald’s cooked its french fries in a mixture of about seven percent cottonseed oil and 93 percent beef tallow. The mixture gave the fries their unique flavor — and more saturated beef fat per ounce than a McDonald’s hamburger.
In 1990, amid a barrage of criticism over the amount of cholesterol in its fries, McDonald’s switched to pure vegetable oil. This presented the company with a challenge: how to make fries that subtly taste like beef without cooking them in beef tallow. A look at the ingredients in McDonald’s french fries suggests how the problem was solved. Toward the end of the list is a seemingly innocuous yet oddly mysterious phrase: “natural flavor.” That ingredient helps to explain not only why the fries taste so good but also why most fast food — indeed, most of the food Americans eat today — tastes the way it does.
Open your refrigerator, your freezer, your kitchen cupboards, and look at the labels on your food. You’ll find “natural flavor” or “artificial flavor” in just about every list of ingredients. The similarities between these two broad categories are far more significant than the differences. Both are man-made additives that give most processed food most of its taste. People usually buy a food item the first time because of its packaging or appearance. Taste usually determines whether they buy it again. About 90 percent of the money that Americans now spend on food goes to buy processed food. The canning, freezing, and dehydrating techniques used in processing destroy most of food’s flavor — and so a vast industry has arisen in the United States to make processed food palatable. Without this flavor industry today’s fast food would not exist. The names of the leading American fast-food chains and their best-selling menu items have become embedded in our popular culture and famous worldwide. But few people can name the companies that manufacture fast food’s taste.
That’s an excerpt from an article in Atlantic Monthly by Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation). He’s saying that when McDonald’s switched from frying their fries in beef tallow to vegetable oil, they had to start adding “natural” flavors in order to make them taste good.
Natural flavors can’t be bad, right? They must be better than artificial flavors.
But they’re not.
“A natural flavor,” says Terry Acree, a professor of food science at Cornell University, “is a flavor that’s been derived with an out-of-date technology.” Natural flavors and artificial flavors sometimes contain exactly the same chemicals, produced through different methods. Amyl acetate, for example, provides the dominant note of banana flavor. When it is distilled from bananas with a solvent, amyl acetate is a natural flavor. When it is produced by mixing vinegar with amyl alcohol and adding sulfuric acid as a catalyst, amyl acetate is an artificial flavor. Either way it smells and tastes the same.
Yuck! It’s bad enough that fast food French fries are fried in rancid vegetable oil, an oil which is not at all suitable for deep frying. But in order to make them taste good, they have to add chemicals.
Why not just use beef tallow? That’s the way people have been frying French fries for centuries.
It’s because of this ridiculous notion that saturated fats are bad for you. And yet there is no evidence to back up that claim. Ancel Keys has been disproven.
One thing I keep coming back to… if you just look back at history, and review the kinds of fats we have been eating, it makes you question how healthy these vegetable and soybean oils are. We’ve never eaten this way — ever — in the history of food. So why is everyone so sold on it? If saturated animal fats like lard and tallow and butter were working for us for centuries, why are they being denigrated now?
Fats & Oils in the Food Supply: 1890 vs. 1990
(in descending order of market share)
1890
Lard
Tallow
Chicken Fat
Butter
Olive Oil
Palm Oil
Coconut Oil
Peanut Oil
Cottonseed Oil
1990
Soybean Oil (70% partially hydrogenated)
Rapeseed Oil, or Canola Oil (usually partially hydrogenated)
Cottonseed Oil
Peanut Oil
Corn Oil
Palm Oil
Coconut Oil
(source: Mary Enig, “Know Your Fats”)
People around the world have been eating saturated animal fats for centuries. This is the first century that we are eating vegetable oils. And look at the rise in heart disease, cancer, etc.
Coincidence? I think not.
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23/06/2008 at 9:01 am Permalink
Glad to hear they turned out nice and crisp! Yummy! So I guess next time I try, I should soak or parboil them. Great tip. That’s prob why In ‘N Out’s fries are soggy. You see them get cut and drop into the fryer without soaking or parboiling. Makes sense. I will have to get beef fat from Rocky Canyon next time. I didn’t know you could get it from them!
23/06/2008 at 9:05 pm Permalink
Haha you are a food detective!
You got some fat from Lindner Bison, didn’t you? That would work!
25/06/2008 at 12:27 pm Permalink
The French fry their best freis in horse lard, the high-quality suet that grows on the kidney. Some of the best quality fat, very nutritious!
25/06/2008 at 4:03 pm Permalink
Oh, yes, I read that about horse fat. I have also read that the “leaf lard” which is the fat that comes from animals near their kidneys — is the very best fat. My beef tallow that I got is actually kidney fat.
25/06/2008 at 6:36 pm Permalink
mmmm – steak frites
Love the blog, cheeseslave. Actually, you’ve been in my blogroll for some time (I think I found you through Fighting Windmills), but since I usually only see my Dashboard, I completely forgot!! Sorry…!
Anyhow, I’m totally with you on the fats issue. When I was a kid, I ate pretty normally, but had seriously scary high cholesterol. After I grew up, got married, and learned eto cook, I had my chol. tested at a routine doc appointment, and it was enviably low. Now, it’s not like I went vegan or anything. When I learned to cook on my own, I started with heavy French foods.
Now, looking back at the difference, here’s the thing: When I was a kid, I ate Velveeta. Processed. Now I eat cheese – natural. Then, I ate margarine. Now, I eat butter. Then: shortening. Fake. Now, bacon fat or lard. Real. (Sometimes olive oil)
I’ve done no studies, but from my own experience believe that our bodies just process animal fats better. JMO.
25/06/2008 at 6:41 pm Permalink
princessedamame -
Wow, very interesting!!!!!
25/06/2008 at 6:41 pm Permalink
PS: Velveeta — UGH! I know, we ate that when we were kids, too. And margarine.
28/06/2008 at 6:53 am Permalink
I loved the taste of the “old” McDonalds fries, I think that was what they were really famous for. Never liked the vegetable oil substitute.
Sounds like you read the book “Real Food”. You have made correct assumptions about the history of saturated fats vs vegetable oils. Why change the way that people have been eating for thousands of years, to listen to a bunch of lined pockets tell us that our ancestors didn’t have a clue?
I wish there was a way to get the word out to the average joe about CAFOs, grass fed farming, raw products, the truth about organics in this country, saturated fat, processed foods, the true costs this country pays for what is sold as “groceries”, the farm bill and who really benefits (can you say Cargill etc…), the unhealthy information and practices put into place and supported by Congress and the FDA. Every citizen should be outraged at what has been forced onto the American people.
Our politicians fake their sympathy for the cost of health care, “food” and the price of gas, yet over 70% of all the costs of health care are related to industrial food sources, regulations and restrictions have forced local farmers out of business and dried up support for them in favor of industrial agricultural companies (same ones mentioned above, who now have the power and money to lobby for anything that they want), and 50% of the gasoline used in this country is used for fertilizing, growing and transporting industrial food (what’s wrong with locally grown food?). Doesn’t sound like our government has the American people’s interests in mind.
We need to have our voices heard!!!
Keep up the good work.
Craig
01/07/2008 at 8:21 pm Permalink
Thank you, Craig, this is a wonderful comment. I totally agree with you 100%.
18/01/2010 at 10:54 am Permalink
THE ULTIMATE FRENCH FRIES ARE FRIED IN BEEF FAT
The ultimate french fry is fried in beef fat — twice!
1) Choose an Idaho Russet potato. Russet Burbank variety if you can get them.
2) Condition the potato by storing in a 70 degree environment for a couple of weeks (potatoes coming out of cold storage need time to convert sugars back to starch).
3) Cut the potatoes into the desired fry size, similar to the fast food places you prefer.
4) Soak the cut potato strips in room temperature water for at least 8 hours, overnight is good (this soaking plumps up the cells within the potatoes to result in an improved texture). DO NOT USE ICE WATER OR REFRIGERATE! The starch will convert back to sugars causing the finished fries to take on a darkened exterior color.
5) Dry the potato strips and fry in 300 degree oil until just cooked inside and limp, fry time is dependent on the thickness of the fry strip. Bite a piece off and taste, if the raw potato taste is absent it’s done inside. Let cool.
6) Bring oil to 375 degrees and fry until golden brown and crispy.
7) Of course, fry in beef fat (tallow), properly twice fried fries will not soak up much fat. What’s the point of endeavoring to produce the very best french fry and then compromising the taste with a neutral tasting fry oil.
9) Rice Bran Oil is the best alternative to those that have a aversion to beef fat. In & Out restaurants are noted for excellent fries, they fry in Rice Bran Oil.
30/07/2010 at 2:20 pm Permalink
RE comment by princessedamame – I have the same story, grew up on many processed foods, velvetta, spam (OMG!), etc. I am 62 and look 40-45 my friends tell me, feel that way too.
For the past 30-40 years I have switched more and more to eating unprocessed foods. Before it was published, I knew butter was better, that our bodies could digest it. I eat lots of eggs, cheese, make my own fries, eat steaks, ribs, etc. And, my cholesterol is excellent: 157 (Trigyyc. 98, HDL 52, LDL 85, VLDL 20).
I feel so sorry for my friends convinced that egg beaters, egg whites, no butter, is the way to lower your cholesterol.
Thanks for posting this info, hope it helps others understand the truth about our foods. Sure wish I could buy some beef tallow/lard and not have to learn how to make my own.