Don't Sweat the Aubergine by Clee Nicholas

Author:Clee, Nicholas [Clee, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781448125128
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2012-05-30T22:00:00+00:00

FRIED POTATOES

You can follow the procedure for roast potatoes: peel, cut up, parboil, dry, then fry. You must fry them in a single layer, as the recipe books say. How large are these writers’ frying pans? I’ve got a pretty large one, and I find it hard to cram it with enough potatoes to satisfy a family of four. Cooking them requires attention: you need to turn them and move them around, to make sure they cook evenly. Grumble, grumble. Still, they taste good.

CHIPS

I don’t make chips often at home. I used to think that they were best left to restaurants, until I learned that even quite prestigious restaurants rely on oven chips. But I still think that maintaining a chip pan, filled with several bottles of rapidly degrading oil, is a bore for the home cook.

Nevertheless, you can get good chips with any old pan, and without a thermometer. It’s quite satisfying.

The two-phase method of cooking chips was commonly accepted as the best, until Heston Blumenthal came up with his three-phase version. Like his mashed potato recipe, it’s for perfectionists rather than for home cooks merely trying to get meals on to their tables.

The two phases are an initial one of about 10 to 15 minutes, at 140°C; and then one at 190°C, until the chips are brown. During phase one, you’re boiling the chips in the oil; phase two is the browning bit. If you tried to combine these phases, the potatoes would brown before the interiors were cooked; also, the first phase – for reasons I don’t fully understand, but something to do with what happens to the surface starch – helps to produce a crunchier chip.

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