Hot Chips

There’s nothing wrong with potato chips in a bag. Except, we guess, their temperature: they are cold. Chips, like anything fried, are better hot. This is a scientific fact.
With that in mind, we decided to offer freshly made, hand-cut chips at our summer Gnosh Pit barbecues. The pots we used were a mix of purple Peruvian and white skinned farmers market beauties. We washed ’em and sliced them thin and long using a handheld mandolin. Then we rinsed them again and (taking Thomas Keller’s lead) we sat them in water overnight to strip the potatoes of their sticky gluten (Keller suggests milk). To finish them the next day, we had a cast iron pot filled with canola oil bubbling next to the grill. They got spun dry in a salad spinner, dunked in fry oil to order, fished out and left to drip-dry, then seasoned. Brilliant! The only problem was that with a line of 20 people ordering “hot chips,” we got a little backed-up.
The best advice we can give you? Drop a small handful in first to prevent scary spill-over oil fires (we learned after that one) and don’t do this barefoot.

4 medium-sized potatoes (purple are prettiest)
2 liters canola oil
1 Tbs. sea salt
1 Tbs. Aleppo pepper
1 Tbs. minced flat leaf parsley
1. The day before: Scrub potatoes clean. Slice potatoes using a mandolin to achieve a consistent centimeter-or-less thickness. If you slice them lengthwise, you’ll get nice long chips. Use that finger guard unless you are a daily mandolin user…
2. Rinsing: fill two large containers (stock pots work great) half way with clean water. Fill one with sliced potatoes and swirl them around/scrub them against each other to get rid of excess starch. After 4 minutes of vigor, transfer the partially clean potatoes into the other pot of clear water and repeat this process, replacing the starchy water with clean water, until the chips are not releasing any starch. To do this correctly, as you can tell, you will use LOTS of water (imagine using milk). Use the water to water your plants and you won’t feel so bad.
3. Place the now clean potato proto-chips in a large Tupperware or vessel and cover with clean water. Jam into the fridge and let sit overnight.
4. Day of: fill a large vessel that is appropriate for the batch size you’re making either a cast iron pot or your favorite, sturdy soup pot 2/3 full with canola oil. Keep on high heat for about 20 minutes, until oil is hot, hot, hot. Don’t bother with a thermometer – drop in one chip to test (dry it first). It should float and sizzle hard.
5. Vigorously dry the chips using a salad spinner. You want them to have as little moisture as possible to avoid a nasty oil-water reaction. Pat them dry if need be too.
4. Drop chips in small handfuls, never exceeding a ratio of roughly one-fifth chips to four-fifths oil. Otherwise your frying. Will. Be. Slow.
5. Once the first chips start to brown, and they appear crisp to the touch, fish them out with a strainer or tongs. Drip dry on paper towels.
6. Season with salt, pepper and parsley and serve.

Beverage: Lagunitas’ Hop Stoopid 2009
Soundtrack: Hot Chip’s “We Were Made in the Dark”