Kitchen Monkey

22 May 2008

Chips away!!!

Having a discussion with my old friend Claire (she would hate it if she heard me say that) we were talking about chips. How children have a love for the long skinny French frie and how the chip varies from this slither of a chip to a chunky thick chip served in restaurants and all of our differing preferences.

Claire was saying how she can never get her chips just right, when I started telling Claire about varieties of potato and how some potatoes are better for certain menu jobs like chips or even mashing than others.

Certain foods are suited to certain cooking methods than others, such as if I gently steamed or simmered some vegetables for a short period this would mean my vegetables retain their nutrition, colour and crispness. When we heat food it undergoes certain changes in flavour, structure and appearance. These changes occur due to chemical reactions which happen inside of the food as we heat it up at varying temperatures, and so different cooking methods which use different temperatures, create different reactions and results to our food. For example if you boil food then the food would never get above the boiling point of water at 100 degrees. However if I introduce oil and start deep frying at 160 degrees (oil boils at 154 degrees), or if I cook over a flame or in a oven above 154 degrees these cooking methods would cause a chemical reaction which in turn would actually start to brown the food, (this process is known as Maillard reaction).

So you have to know the reaction to the food when using a certain cooking method and environment you are cooking in, to enable you to determine the results you require from your food.

With proper chips which would be fried using a deep fat fryer (and I hear halve of you gasp with horror). You should use a Maris Piper or King Edward potato as these brands of potato are very starchy, which means they will hold their texture together bette; where as a waxy potato whose texture retains alot more water such as a Desire brand of potato would result in a soggy chip. Chefs are actually taught at college to cut a chip to 2 inch by ½ inch by ½ inch, which would actually soak up less oil than if you cut one of these chips this size in halve which increases the surface area and although this thinner chip would give you a crispier chip, the bigger original size chip would be less oilier.
Potatoes should be cut to the appropriate size and then washed and dried before frying in a fryer at 160 degrees. The bubbling you actually see in the fryer is the water evaporating from the potato. This would soften the chip, but for a crispier chip you would need to fry at 180 degrees.
You can actually produce your own precooked chips, (just cook at 160 degrees until soft or limp, cool them down and dry them before freezing them), you would then return them to a fryer at 180 degrees to cook when required.

Have a play and let me know what your favourite chip is. Send in your tip and we can add them to our book which we are collecting for to raise funds for our charity ‘Tommy’s the baby charity’, email me on jacqui@kitchenmonkey.co.uk with your favourite and I’ll post my findings later.