Discover all the good
tips to spot the best fries and to succeed at home like real professionals. You
will be an expert on the issue!
Whether Belgian or French, the fries are a must at the meal
table. Adored by young and old alike, it goes well with an endless array of
dishes and can even be eaten alone with a good mayonnaise, ketchup or homemade
barbecue sauce . But do you know what makes good fries? How to recognize them?
And especially how to prepare them yourself at home? No ? That's good, our
colleagues at Le Parisien have some good tips unearthed from French fries
professionals. Discover them without further delay!
How to
recognize good fries?
Depending on whether you prefer home fries or frozen, the
definition of a good fry varies. If you are more of the first group, know that
most of the fries found in stores and restaurants are frozen. Fresh, homemade
fries are recognizable by their uneven shapes and often different colors. Since
they were cut by hand before being immersed in several oil baths, they are
necessarily irregular, unlike industrial ones which are cut mechanically. These
tend to be straight as sticks, and sometimes even dry since they have been
processed several times before arriving in a bag in your shopping cart at the
supermarket.
How to make good fries at home?
To make good fries at home, there are several crucial steps
to follow. First, there is the choice of the potato . If you don't make omelets
without breaking eggs, you can't make French fries without peeling potatoes.
Asked by the Parisian, Yoni Cohen, the boss of Maison Colom (supplier of fruit
and vegetables), declares that three types of potatoes make it possible to make
good fries: " La bintje, agria, et la spunta ". If you opt for the
first, be careful to use it quickly, because it keeps less well than its
cousins. Then comes the cooking step. At this point, there are several schools,
but all agree that you need to cook the potato at least 2 times to get fries
that are both soft and crispy. Some people cook them beforehand in a salt water
bath, before putting them in a first oil bath at 150 ° C, for about 8 minutes,
with an oil of your choice (sunflower, peanut, grape seed , etc. .). Then comes
a second oil bath for about 3 minutes, to obtain a beautiful gilding. The
result: French fries that are crispy on the outside and soft on the inside.
The little tip: if you don't like your fatty fries, skip the
oil baths and prefer an oil-free fryer that is available on the market. You can
also bake them in the oven or in a pan, as long as you don't have a whole
plaster of them. Otherwise, it might take up the day. The oven chips have the
advantage of being less fat.
