Culinary Compendium 20 – Fries

Welcome one and all to Freaky Fry-day, a post that is going up on a Thursday. OOH, SO FREAKY! (Editor’s note: This was intended to go up, as normal, on Thursday, but Jon was unable to work Thursday morning due to a brief illness. So I guess the DARK MAGIC empowering Freaky Friday made this post happen.) Anyway, this is the Culinary Compendium of Cooking Cant Kooky-Spooky Edition: As we covered an array of interesting recipes based on Fries on Monday, Today, we’re going to give you a shorter tour AROUND THE WORLD of fry-ghtening fry dishes, which are really only scary if you have a potato allergy. BUT WE WON’T LET GOOD THEMING GO TO WASTE. LET US BEGIN

CHIPS

So, in England, is “the old block” from which chips are made assumed to be potato?

It’s very heat-breaking to me, but, technically speaking, my puns this week don’t WORK for like, half the entries, thanks to SOMEONE being an imperialist DICK and conquering half the world. I am, of course, lamenting the fact that because America calls them ‘fries’, and England calls them “chips”, and England had A LOT MORE COLONIES than America, that a lot of these “fry” recipes are chip recipes. Sorry if I don’t seem very chip-per about it, it’s just a harder pun set to work with.

Technically slightly different than most American fries, as we covered in the “British Cooking Compendium”, proper British chips are heftier than the average American fry, at about ½” thick, and almost 3” in length. (For our British readers, American fries tend to be closer to about 5-6 mm thick.) Not quite as large as steak fries, but bigger.

CHIPS, CURRY

Yes, that’s about the lowest-effort version I could imagine, given that name.

Curry Chips are, rather obviously, “Chips that have curry sauce on them”. That’s it. They’re popular in the UK and Ireland, with some polls stating they’re the favorite chips of 1/5th the population. A thing of fried potatoes with a mild curry sauce poured over it. Spirited in its simplicity, I suppose.

CHIPS, FINGER

I can’t tell if these are seasoned normal fries, or unseasoned sweet potato fries. EITHER is reasonable.

Finger Chips, to add to the confusion, are either a take on the first entry in this list, or a regional variant on the SECOND (or maybe the fourth, see more below) entry. Some recipes I’ve seen assert that ‘finger chips’ are just a term for once-fried French Fries in some regions: that to be a ‘true’ French Fry, the potato shapes have to be fried TWICE, while Finger Chips are only fried once. Others assert that “finger chip” is the Indian English term for French Fries: that trying to draw a distinction between the two is like trying to argue the difference between a bad car and a “junker”.

And I’m willing to accept that. The Only thing I think needs to be added is the detail of seasoning, which is where the second/fourth comparison comes from: while the default seasoning for French Fries in America is simply salt, we DO have many outlets that use more nuanced and complicated spice blends. Mixture of chili powder, pepper, salt, paprika, all sort of “Fry spice” mixes exist. Similarly, in India, it’s very common for ‘finger chips’ to be covered in turmeric, or chili powder, or garam masala, or other curry powder mixtures. (This is actually a fairly common system in Asia, where many restaurants give out fry spice packets the way an American chain will give out dipping sauce options. More on that later) Hence my comparison to the curry chips, where mild curry sauce is replaced on finger chips with a dusting of curry powder. And to our NEXT ENTRY

CHIPS, MASALA

It’s a messy, mas-y, spicy and saucy pile.

Masala Chips are, maybe somewhat surprisingly, African. It’s not ALL that surprising when you remember that Kenya was a British colony, and the wealthy British brought their Indian staffs, as we touched on in the Koshari post. But basically, Masala Chips are the answer to the question of “What if Curry Chips were made by people who didn’t think black pepper was the peak of piquancy”? Less jokingly, Masala chips are a typically spicier, sort of mid point between Curry chips and Finger chips, where instead of the curry sauce just being poured over the prepped chips, the sauce is actually cooked and seasoned beforehand, and the chips are tossed in it, where the chips are more ‘coated in’ the sauce. Think of like, the differences between pouring nacho cheese over a bowl of chips, and tossing pasta in sauce: there’s more coating, but more thinly. Anyhow, it sounds cool, and I will probably try it sometime.

CHIPS, SLAP

So named because they will beat your children if you won’t.

Now, I forgave Kenya and India for calling Fries chips, given, again, the whole “British Empire” deal. But SOUTH AFRICA was a DUTCH colony, and-I’m sorry, I’m getting a telegraph from 1805. Oh. Brtain took it? I see. Conquered to prevent French Expansion. Goddamn it, England. So I guess I will ALSO forgive South Africa for Chips.

Slap Chips are a South African version of ‘chips’ that are notable for a lot more…sogginess/softness. The chips are soaked in vinegar prior to frying, in order to break down the potato structure, then they’re fried, and tossed with salt, and often, more vinegar.  And don’t get me wrong, I know that “soggy” isn’t often a great word for fries, but having had plenty of good vinegar-doused fries/chips, and it can work very nicely. Hell, there’s supposedly an old joke that “Poutine can be hard to make, and take a long time, but at least at the end, you get soggy fries”.  I’m just letting people know that if they’re used to crispier fries/chips, Slap chips are going to be a different texture.

FRITES SAUCE

Speaking of Poutine, I want to touch on a regional variant of it that is VERY complicated and elaborate, frites sauce, which is the complicated idea of “What if we just had gravy on fries?” Truly groundbreaking. Though I will note that there ARE actually a lot of interesting poutine variants, from Poutine Italienne (Poutine with Italian tomato sauce instead of gravy) to Poutine All-dress (sausage, onion, green peppers and mushrooms, almost a “Philly Cheesesteak Fries”) Poutine Popcorn (including popcorn chicken). On Prince Edward Island, they have “Fries with the works”, which are fries with ground beef, peas, and gravy (meaning that we are dangerously close to being able to reasonably crate “Keema Matar Poutine”) sometimes with mushrooms and cheese added.  Like I said before, there’s a growing movement to consider poutine become “what you call a mixture of sauce and toppings on Fries”, and it has a LOT of variety.

FURAIDO POTETO

The common problem of fry photography: the rich palette of whites, browns, and beiges.

No, that’s not a typo. Technically, one of the Japanese words for potato is Romanized as “poteto”. And, maybe also kind of tragically, that first word, “foo-RAI-do” is a transliteration of the word “fried”. The Japanese word for ‘french fries” is, like French and several other languages, “fried Potato”, and it is VERY WEIRD that it sounds like someone just saying “Fried potato” in a mockery of a Japanese accent.

Look, the important thing here to talk about is the kak. Furikak. E. Furikake. That joke was a stretch. Anywho, if you don’t know, furikake is a Japanese condiment consisting of sesame seeds, chopped seaweed, salt, sugar, MSG, and a BUNCH of other stuff: typically some kind of fried or cured fish, often things like ‘powdered vegetables, powdered miso”, and more elaborate additions like “crumbled freeze-dried egg/kimchi”. The point is that it’s often added to cooked rice, or fish, or mixed into onigiri, and it’s a popular topping for Fries.

This is where we’re revisiting the “Fry spice” packages mentioned in India. Japan likes Furikake on their fries, and other East and South-East Asian countries will have things like “Wasabi Fry Spice” mixes, or “Togarashi Fry Spice” packets.  

HONEY BUTTER FRIES

Sweet and salty steak fries is not something you wake up expecting to write.

Meanwhile, also in East Asia (Korea is an East Asian country, right? I’m not feeling well today, so I may be a little off on that claim), Korea is, somewhat recently, having a hey-day with Honey Butter Fries. (note that I am a 32-year-old American, and thus it’s entirely likely that by the time I have heard of ANY trend in Korea, it is long dead.)

Basic summary, in 2014, a potato chip company came out with “Honey Butter Potato Chips”, which quickly went viral. Interestingly, they had made the product in JAPAN a couple years before, but it didn’t catch on. In Korea, within a couple months the product was completely unavailable, and being hawked online for 3x its selling price. We’re talking “stores had a “one per customer” rule, and an APP was made to track if local stores had it”. At the peak, bags were selling for FIFTY times the initial cost.

This has all calmed down, but that initial spike was HUGE, so of course other industries started jumping on it. There was Honey Butter Beer, Honey butter dried squid, Honey Butter Cheetos, hell, for about a week, McDonald’s had Honey Butter Fries in Korean locations.

Are they still a thing? I don’t know. But, I wouldn’t be too surprised to know they’ve still got fans.  Somewhat strangely, the profile also lines up with Vietnamese fries, which are dusted with SUGAR, and served with softened butter.

KAPSALON

Like a Dutch Taco Salad with fries. Which is a sentence of MADNESS.

No discussion of global fry trends would be complete without revisiting the Netherlands, where fry toppings are numerous and wild. This specific dish, whose name means  “the hair salon”, was an invention in Rotterdam: a shawarma shop in the city was next to a hair salon, and apparently, the hairdressers would often split a large order of essentially fry-gyro nachos: a layer of fries, with shawarma meat or doner meat (We talked about this once before, but just to remind you: “gyro” and “doner” are two regional names for the same basic preparation: Gyro is the Greek, while Doner is the Turkish. Shawarma is actually the Arabic/SYRIAN version of the same idea, also arising from a weird translation issue. (Basic explanation, “doner” in Turkish meant “to turn”. Greeks heard about “turned meat”, and used THEIR word for ‘turning”, gyro. as in “gyroscope”. On the other hand, a different Turkish word, çevirme (supposedly meaning “turning”, but all the sources I have suggest “translation”, though ‘cev’ does mean “turn”) was then transliterated in Arabic as “shaverma”, and later shawarma), with Gouda cheese, heated through, and then topped with lettuce, garlic sauce, and sambal, mixing together the various preferred ingredients of the hairdressers. Over time, the hair-dresser that walked over to order the dish started simply calling it “the hair-salon order”, and the dish caught on with others, who then tried to order it (not knowing the hyper-specificity of its creation) at other stores, until it was served nationally, and eventually internationally.  

MAKKARAPERUNAT

This, like the hair salon, looks like chaos, but it will make sense in a second.

In a very similar set-up, Finland created makkaraperunat, makkara being a Finnish style of sausage, and perunat meaning “potatoes”. So sausagepotatoes. The dish is a mixture of fried sausage slices and (specifically) crinkle-cut fries, often seasoned with various toppings (indeed, interestingly, mostly very “American hamburger/hot dog” toppings: mustard, ketchup, relish, chopped onions, mayonnaise, etc) making it linguistically AND culinarily a lot like Salchipapas.  

And that’s the list for today. As you can see, we got 10 examples, and only reached the M’s. That’s the literal HALFPOINT of the alphabet. That implies the existence of up to 10 other examples. Will we find them? I don’t know. I’m very forgetful.  

MONDAY: JON VEGS OUT, BECAUSE HE’S NOT FEELING THE BEST.

THURSDAY: WHO KNOWS.