Subtitles section Play video
-
There's steam coming off it.
-
Chips.
-
I get very, very nostalgic about proper British chips.
-
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-styled chips,
-
don't you think?
-
My great-grandparents ran a chippy.
-
So I've got chip fat in my blood,
-
and my Nan made the best chips in the world, which was good
-
because my mum was of the generation that totally thought
-
chips were poison to children.
-
And my dad, bless his heart, was an insurance investigator,
-
and he used to come home every day
-
having seen another chip-pan fire.
-
So I'd sneak round to Nan's for chips.
-
Chips are so emotional for me.
-
You got your gear ready?
-
Yeah, sunflower oil, which was not easy to find.
-
Any neutral vegetable oil will work, two,
-
three inches of that.
-
We're going to aim to get this off to 165 degrees centigrade.
-
Best potato, if you can get it, is Maris Piper.
-
I want chip shop chips.
-
Chips are going to be fat, right?
-
It's important that they're uniform though because you
-
don't want them kind of cooking at different...
-
That's exactly right, yeah.
-
The original way to do it was just
-
to chuck the chips in the fat, and 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 going to do here.
-
It was low temperature, first of all, which steams the inside,
-
then you heat the oil back up, you put them back in again,
-
and that crisps the exterior.
-
The really clever way that a lot of chefs are doing it
-
now is called triple cooking.
-
You steam the potatoes first, or boil them, then you dry them,
-
then you do the double cook process.
-
They'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 the steamer and some of them just fall apart.
-
You have kindly provided me with this cooking thermometer.
-
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 a thermometer or you
-
don't have a deep fat fryer where
-
you can set the temperature, 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 without a thermometer.
-
Honestly, you've got to get these things in every home
-
kitchen in the country.
-
It makes everything so much simpler.
-
The dinner ladies at your kid's school use this by law.
-
The kid in a paper hat in Terminal Acme at McDonald's
-
uses one of these by law.
-
You can get one online for 12 quid.
-
There is no logical reason why every kitchen does not got one.
-
What's your temperature now?
-
Don't touch the bottom of the pan with it.
-
OK.
-
I did just do that.
-
It's OK.
-
So I've just cut up one potato to chips about that size.
-
Lay them out on a tray on a piece of kitchen roll.
-
Mate, you are making pretty heavy weather
-
of cooking some chips.
-
You've all but got your tongue sticking out
-
the corner of your mouth.
-
Well, is what you were saying about making them uniform.
-
I'm possibly overthinking this.
-
Well, that's what I mean.
-
After the bread shift I was quite prepared
-
to give you a job.
-
I'm looking at it now and thinking,
-
you really better stick to the day job of making videos.
-
Even on minimum wage, you can't cut chips fast enough.
-
Sure.
-
I just snorted.
-
Do them in two batches.
-
Lower them into the fat.
-
Never overfill the pan because that's
-
how you start a chip-pan fire.
-
You just stop them before they go brown really.
-
You're keeping them vaillant blonde.
-
We're essentially kind of hard boiling them, except in fat.
-
Yes.
-
It's precisely that process.
-
And do this first stage, which is called blanching,
-
and you just lay them out on trays,
-
with paper underneath them to catch the grease.
-
You have the chip pan going at the second temperature, which
-
is 185.
-
And how long does the frying it at 185 take?
-
About three minutes.
-
In they go.
-
So Tim, if he had to choose, French fries or fat British
-
chips?
-
No question.
-
Fat English chips.
-
Fat English chips 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 with those, yeah,
-
you want to do them how they would do it in a McDonald's.
-
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 wool balls the same way if you want to.
-
For those kind of fries, those 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 a...
-
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 going
-
to season your chips beautifully,
-
is going to be the amount of melted butter
-
that runs down your chin.
-
I don't think it needs anything else, frankly, a chip butty,
-
does it?
-
It doesn't need any sauce?
-
My camera operator says that I used
-
too much butter on 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.
-
OK, here we go.
-
The steam coming off it.
-
That's good.
-
Mmm.
-
Just check camera two.
-
Good?
-
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 chips like this demand it.
-
Not on the butty, not necessarily.
-
I think when you have chips in newspaper, which you should,
-
by the way, even though it's not legal anymore,
-
chips on the newspaper taste different.
-
I think they really need vinegar with them and lots of salt.
-
But I think in a chip butty, you don't need the vinegar as much
-
because it's about the butter.
-
It's funny talking about the newspaper
-
because if you're of 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, wrapped, so you could then unwrap it at home,
-
and eat it.
-
That's right.
-
The vinegar would have kind of evaporated at this point.
-
I used to ask for extra batter bits on top.
-
Do you ever do that, scraps?
-
Oh, yes.
-
Yeah, you're starting to think like a scientific chef.
-
You imagine how you encapsulate those things and you set them,
-
and then you carry them home, and that's a 10-minute process
-
of steaming and settling, of flavours getting to know each
-
other.
-
And that's got to make it a different product then the one
-
that came out of the pan and was eaten at the shop.
-
Those things are so emotional for us.
-
They're so coded into our brains emotionally,
-
I think culturally, but I love it.
-
I just I can'...
-
I can talk about chips forever.