I have a hard time with tropical cooking. That feeling of fear when you know you’re intentionally leaving the burger on the griddle too long. Cause, there’s nothing more tropical than burned food. You’ve gotta time it right though or that shit gets gross. Plop some pineapples on it and you’re in the tropics. Great way to pass winter. I prefer to eat mine in front of a fan with a space heater and a humidifier behind it, with Men at Work blasting. I call it the warm island breeze

This is my second try on Dave Arnold’s french fry method. The first one I lost a lot of fries, but the ones that I got were among the best fries I’ve ever had. Maybe the best I’ve had. Without a doubt the best fries I’ve ever made. I assumed that I may have overdone the pectinex soak and wasn’t quite as careful with the blanching as I should have been. Still getting used to the high power induction burner, I ended up with a too aggressive boil. I was ready this time.

Thi

I’ve heard Dave Arnold himself describe this process as something like ‘a pain in the butt’ on his radio show, so if you’re gonna try it, get ready. It’s not that bad though, and a bit of extra work for fries on a night spent cooking is always worth it. I’ll give a general overview and some places where I screwed up, so hopefully you won’t.

Basically, you cut, rinse the potatoes. Soak them in a .4% solution of Pectinex SP-L and water for an hour, blanch in 3% salt water for 14.5 minutes, drain, but not fan them and double fry them. I’ll defer to Cooking Issues for more detail.

The first time I did this I used probably more like a 0.6% pectinex soak. I squeezed a bit too much and had just heard or read somewhere that pectinex tends to degrade over time, so figured I’d just go with it. Probably, that had less to do with my problems than getting the blanching boiling too rapidly. I had lots of fries that fell apart during the drying step.

This time I was exact on the enzyme soak amount and time. I kept the pot boiling over 80c but as gentle as I could. I still lost probably 1/3 of the batch, but a large improvement over the 2/3 I lost the first time I tried it. Maybe something with my potatoes? Maybe I should do the next batch in a circulator at 95c and put them on the drying racks in unstirred water, so I don’t need to mess with them to take them out. Maybe I should ask for any tips or ideas from Dave himself.

Either way, look at them. They had a great crunch, perfectly cooked and salted potato insides. Probably half of them were already gone by the time we sat down to eat. Totally worth extra time in prep.