Chris Young

Watch the video with Andy Hearnden

I learned to make Heston’s triple-cooked chips at The Fat Duck by turning them into potato soup. The stove was around the corner from my section, so I’d leave my other prep to check them, find they weren’t ready, then get distracted by something else. When I tried taking them out sooner, Ash came flying round the corner: those weren’t right either.

The surface needed to begin falling apart. Those cracks would become weak spots in a thin crust that shattered when you bit into it; stopping at tender wouldn’t get us there. My rule of thumb was that if I wasn’t losing ten to twenty percent in the blanch, I hadn’t gone far enough. We made more than we needed.

After all that, the potato could still let you down. Too little dry matter leaves a pasty chip without much crust; too much sugar makes it brown too quickly. I want freshly harvested potatoes with about 22% dry matter—the part that isn’t water. At The Fat Duck, we weighed them in air and water, changed varieties with the season, and sometimes took chips off the menu because nothing available was good enough.

I can’t get that information by picking up a supermarket potato. Cold storage can turn starch into sugar, and looking at the skin won’t tell me what’s happened inside. But frozen-fry producers can demand a specification, then sort and test potatoes for dry matter and sugar before blanching and freezing them.

That’s why I started with plain frozen fries for Andy Hearnden. The producers had selected the potatoes; I still had to build the crust. I blanched them further to roughen the surface, cooled them, and put them through the two frying stages. I got the thin, shattering crust and fluffy middle I wanted, and Andy approved.

Triple-cooked chips · Deep-fried steak · Bordelaise

Triple-cooked chips

Aged frying oil helps fresh oil break in quickly and brown food more evenly.

Deep-fried hanger steak

Sauce bordelaise