More like Valen-fries Day amirite?
I don’t know why I am still on food PR press lists, because it’s been years since I have actively written about restaurants. But for whatever reason I still get email blasts about trendy new dishes and specials to commemorate whatever bullshit ”National TK Day” that’s coming up. So of course I’ve had a number of press releases about Valentine’s Day in my inbox over the past week or so, my favorite of which inquired if I was interested in writing a story about heart-shaped pizza. Reader, I was not.
If Valentine’s food content inevitably sucks (once, I wrote about a KBBQ place in Koreatown that served chicken-heart skewers), Valentine’s Day food does not have to suck. It certainly won’t if you make French fries. While they may be the ur-potato preparation, fries are not generally something that people make at home. (If you have a counter-top deep-fryer, an air-fryer or something such, please recognize that your in the minority.) For most people, fries are a dining-out food—whether at a fancy burger place or a drive through. But they don’t have to be! They don’t even have to be that hard or complicated to make, so long as you have the right equipment (a cast-iron pan), and are willing to risk a few grease-splatter burns. Still, even knowing the trick I am about to fill you in on, I rarely make actual fried-fries at home (the last time I did was after Anthony Bourdain died), which maybe feeds into Nora Ephron’s theory of relationships and potatoes. (Before we get into this, let me note that I make very good crispy potatoes, and I make them regularly; I almost never make mashed potatoes.)
“Crispy potatoes require an immense amount of labor,” Ephron writes in Heartburn, he novelized account of how shitty Carl Bernstein is. There’s the peeling, the chopping, the soaking to keep the potatoes from discoloring, the drying. “All this takes time, and time, as any fool can tell you, is what true romance is about. In fact, one of the main reasons why you must make crisp potatoes in the beginning is that if you don’t make them in the beginning, you never will. I’m sorry to be so cynical about this, but that’s the truth.”
After the honey-moon period of crisp potatoes, according to Ephron, comes the no-potatoes phase of the relationship, and then the end of the relationship, which is marked by a craving for mashed potatoes. Make of this what you will; for our purposes, the point is that homemade French fries are romantic.
So here’s the trick: instead of getting a vat of oil hot and dumping raw potatoes into it, you put both the potatoes and the oil into a cold skillet and and heat up the oil and the starch up together. Have you ever seen “thrice-cooked” fries on a snobby gastropub menu? The reason for double- or triple-frying fries is that the early stage(s) is done at a low temp to actually cook the potatoes, and then the higher temp fry at the end makes the already-cooked potatoes crispy. But if you have the potatoes in the oil as the oil heats up? Its like having a different fryer for every degree of temperature change; by the time the oil is hot enough to actually fry the potatoes, they’ve been oil-poached tender, and will get beautifully crisp and burnished during the high-heat phase. The only down side is that you can make just one batch this way, but one batch is perfect for two people. See? Romance.
Fries aren’t the only crispy food that can be made with this slow-fry method (I’ve been trying to come up with a good Kacey Musgraves joke all week, but it’s just not working). Jessica Battilana has a slow-fry recipe for crispy shallots in her wonderful book Repertoire, which I could gladly eat on top of rice and a fried egg for longer than I’d like to admit. The same principal is at play: the shallots get cooked first (which, unlike potatoes, makes them sweeter), and then they get crisp. You could make hot-dish onions in the same manner, and crispy garlic chips too.
French Fries
Potatoes (two large russets or three medium-sized potatoes)
Neutral oil
Salt
Prep the potatoes: peel them if you’d like, and cut into the shape of French fries. If you want a classic fry, use russets. I don’t go through the whole water-soaking rigamarole, but it’s not a bad idea to pat the cut potatoes dry before cooking.
Put the potatoes in a cast-iron pan, and pour in enough oil to cover. Turn the heat to medium and mind the pan as the oil heats up. Knowing when the fries are done is more a question of color than time: as the oil gets hotter, it will eventually starts to sizzle aggressively, like a deep fryer, and you’ll want to watch for your ideal fry color. I like mine a dark burnished brown, but you can pull them out at a classic McDonald’s gold too. Remove the potatoes with a slotted spoon, and transfer to a plate lined with paper towels. Salt heavily immediately, and eat immediately too.