French fries or British fat-cut chips? In the latest in our home-cooking series, the FT’s Daniel Garrahan is feeling nostalgic about childhood trips to the chippy so food writer Tim Hayward shows him his favourite way to fry and serve the humble potato – a chip shop-style chip butty. See if you get the FT for free as a student ( or start a £1 trial:
The steam coming up it chips i get very very nostalgic about proper british ships i mean i love french fries with all my heart dipped in mayonnaise plenty of salt but there’s just something really nostalgic about fat british style ships anything my great-grandparents ran a chippy so i’ve got chip fat in my blood and my nan may the best chips in the world which
Was good because my mum was at the generation that totally thought chips were poisoned to children and one day bless his heart was an insurance investigator and he used to come home every day having seen another chip pan fire likes nutrients and their intimate chips and so chips are so emotional for me did you get your gear ready yeah sunflower oil which was
Not easy right mines any neutral vegetable audible work to three inches of that we’re gonna aim to get this up to 165 degrees centigrate potato if you can get it it’s maris piper i want chip shop chips it’s got to be fat right it’s important that they’re uniform though because you don’t want them kind of cooking it that’s exactly right yeah the original way to
Do it was just to chop the chips in the fact that the outside fries and the inside steams but it doesn’t really work that brilliantly the second way was to double cook which is what we’re gonna do here with low temperature first of all which steams the inside then you heat the oil back up and you put them back in again and that crisps the exterior the really
Clever way that a lot of chefs are doing it now it’s called triple cooking steam the potatoes first or boil them then you dry them then you do the double cook process i’ll never admit this when they tell you about how they’re cooking it but you probably lose about a third of your chips because they come out of a stealing and something just fall apart you have
Kindly provided me with this cooking the monitor yes so this is how we’re going to test the temperature of the oil what about if you don’t have one of these things if you don’t have them a thermometer or you don’t have a deep fat fryer where you can set the temperatures then i would suggest you cut the chips quite thin put them in let them go until they look
Good on the outside then pull one out and try it and that’s all you can really do with that come on honestly you’ve got to get these things every home kitchen in the country it makes everything so much simpler the dinner ladies at your kids school use this bylaw the kid in a paper hat and terminal acneic mcdowell’s uses one of these by law you can get one online
For 12 quid there is no logical reason where every kitchen has not got one what’s your temperature now don’t touch the bottom of the pan with it ah okay i did just do that that’s okay so i just cut up one potato two chips about that size lay them out on a tray on a piece of kitchen roll mate you are making pretty heavy weather of cocking some chips all but got
Your tongue staying about making them uniform i’m possibly overthinking this i mean after the bread shoot i was quite prepared to give you a job i’m looking at it now and thinking you really better stick to the tape job of making videos even on the edge just snorted didn’t do to me two batches lower them into the fats never overfill the pan cuz that’s how you
Start a chip pan fine just stop them before they go brown ruin are you keeping them failing blonde essentially kind of parboiling them accepted fats yes it’s precisely that process they do this first stage which is called blanching and you just lay them out on trays like i hope for underneath them to catch the grease you have a chip pan going at the second
Temperature which is one a five and how long does their frying it 185 take that three minutes being there go the team if you have to choose french fries orb or fat british chips a question facking the ships every time i mean i think they both have their place for me it’s about it tasting like potatoes so the inside of a good chip should taste like the inside
Of a proper baked potato you can get all kinds of horrible cheap commodity chipping chips and we throw this yeah you want to do them that they would do it in a mcdonald’s you know you plunge them in the fat it’s all about the fat crisp outer coat and nobody really cares about the inside that’s fine you could do cotton wall balls the same way if you’re monty
But it’s kind of fries there’s american-style fries or continental european style fries with a cold beer and a pot of mayonnaise and lashings of salt i mean that is it yes that’s a beautiful thing don’t knock it my bread is buttered and this is very very important the main condiment you’re thinking about here the thing that’s going to really give a season
Your chips beautifully it’s going to be the amount of melted butter that runs down your chair i think it needs anything else frankly a chip butty does it doesn’t need any sauce my camera operator says that i use too much butter my bread and too much salt on my chips but i think something like a chip butty deserves too much of both of those things okay here we
Go the steam coming up it that’s good just check camera two yep camera two is really happy i’m really happy are you happy i’m happy i didn’t put any vinegar on i think that fat ships like this demand it not on the block to you they’re not necessarily i think when you have the chips in newspaper which you should by the way even though it’s not illegal anymore
Chips up a newspaper tastes different i think they really need vinegar with them and what’s the song by they’re gonna chip butty you don’t need the vinegar as much because it’s about the butter it’s been you talking about the newspaper because if you’re a certain age that’s another thing that just evokes memories of childhood for me it was a bag of chips wrapped
In the newspaper not open wrap so you could then unwrap it at home and eat it that’s what the vinegar would have kind of evaporated at this point i just asked for extra batter bits on top you ever do that scraps oh yes yeah you’re starting to think like a scientific chef you know imagine how it you you encapsulate those things and you set them and then you
Carry them home and that’s a ten-minute process of steaming and settling of flavors getting to know each other and that’s got to make it a different products the one that came out of the panama’s ate was eaten at the shore those things are so emotional for us they’re so coded into our brains emotionally and i think culturally but i’m not it i just i can’t talk about ships forever
Transcribed from video
Lockdown lunches: how to make perfect chips | FT By Financial Times