Real French Fries
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.
