Quite some time ago, I wrote about cooking a beautifully seared, perfectly rare steak without filling your neighborhood with smoke . It’s time for the other shoe to drop: the french fries.
In terms of outcome, there’s nothing wrong with cooking these the traditional way: in moderately hot fat until cooked through, then in immoderately hot fat until golden brown and crisp. But in the typical home kitchen there are obstacles: mustering enough heat to keep enough fat hot enough to do the job;the danger of splattering or even overflow;the cleanup;and the lingering odor. So, unless you have an atypical home kitchen, french fries, made from scratch, are probably not often on your menu.
The trick is to put the potatoes into cold oil and slowly bring it up to frying temperature. I’ve known about this for decades: Back in the 1970s, my friend Tom Kingston told me that this was how his mother always did it. This sounded so loony that I didn’t try it until a couple of years ago. It is amazingly successful.
The one down side (apart from the limit on quantity) is that this can take as long as an hour. So, (a) plan ahead and (b) be ready to sit down and eat as soon as they’re done, drained and well salted.
