Well, the random nature of the quarantine task jar strikes again! I have appreciated that it has thus far compelled me to tackle a number of chores (those are the purple slips) and gotten me busy with some yard tasks (the green slips), but it has also allowed me some fun in my kitchen (the blue slips). The irrational hope in a lottery approach is that there is a reasonably even distribution based on probability, that I'd have to do two or three purple chores and then maybe a green yard chore, and perhaps once a week a fun blue slip would appear so that the monotony could be broken or I could be rewarded for diligence! But random also means there's a good chance of repetition of types, or a clumping of types, and I get that, especially since we're not operating on the order of hundreds or thousands of slip chances. All that is a prelude to say: on Sunday a week ago I drew the slip that said "Chocolate Cake" (and it was an absolutely amazing chocolate cake); on Monday I skipped the slips since I had that much-needed root canal; but then that Tuesday morning task jar drawing brought out another blue slip: Homemade French Fries.
Over the years I've added a handful of recipes for french fries to my collection but I think I've only ever bothered to make 'em a couple of times: once as pommes frites (for Meal No. 138), and another time to go with Boogaloo Wonderland Sandwiches (for Meal No. 2048). But who doesn't love french fries? As long as I was traipsing down this fatty diet-busting trail, I decided to go all the way: no other fixins for the meal, just platters of fries, but how about an assortment of as-yet-untested dips and sauces that would be worth sampling?
I settled on four: comeback sauce, steak sauce, cheese sauce, and homemade beer ketchup (made only once, but on another occasion for those wonderful Wonderland Sandwiches). The fries were cooked in two batches, so dinner was eaten in two batches. I had seconds on all the sauces except for the cheese...it was tasty but I can also easily do without.
And how were the fries? Oh, they were pretty good as well...but they ended up as very short stubs. I'm thinking I must've extended their initial salt-water-and-vinegar water boil beyond what the recipe had called for, so they became quite fragile. Were they better than the other homemade version of french fries that I've done, or better than the bags of frozen french fries that are so convenient? Hmmm....I'm not sure they were. I went to a lot of trouble to make these (it's why they had to be a quarantine task jar item, because I was unlikely to mess with 'em otherwise): the peeling and cutting and boiling and initial frying and chilling and then the second frying. Clean-up was a bear, and I learned the hard way that the only method I have, in spite of a wealth of various appliances, for getting a 400°F deep fry temp is to use my cooktop and a Dutch oven. My countertop induction plate and my official deep fat fryer top out at 375°F, and my electric wok at full blast can only get oil up to 360°F. These are useful lessons but I do not like having to pour 360°F oil from a wok that's falling short of the intended mark into a Dutch oven so that all the dinner machinations can proceed with minimal delay.
Still, though, there's reason for more than a few of you to feel jealous as you read this particular blog post, because they were still mighty fine fries. I bet at your house on that same night, you'd've been laughed out of the room if you'd asked to have a dinner made up entirely of platters of fries. The Roediger House is living large and reckless in these strange quarantine-like times.
"Perfect Thin and Crispy French Fries," from J. Kenji López-Alt, Chief Culinary Consultant of SeriousEats.com. [Published 28 May 2010]
"Homemade Beer Ketchup," by Russell White. From Ugly Stick Brewing. [Published 28 June 2016]
"Comeback Sauce," from Robyn Stone of addapinch.com. [Published 11 June 2013]
"Steak Sauce," from Michael Symon on FoodNetwork.com.
"Cheese Sauce for Fries and Nachos," from J. Kenji López-Alt, Chief Culinary Consultant of SeriousEats.com. [Published 17 September 2010]
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