Duck Fat French Fries

Hi I'm Josh Ozersky, here on eHow.com. Today we are making duck fat French fries. A very highly epicurean gourmet item admired by gastronomes the world over, classy, non-greasy, non-trashy, that is to say none of the things usually associated with my food. Basically I take a potato, I cut it into pieces like so. I make it into French fries and then those French fries are cooked in duck fat which is what this is here, 325 degrees. The basic idea is that I am going to blanch these things in this intensely flavorful fat. Now you might say to yourself well look dude, why not just fry them the whole way in duck fat. I mean, if you like duck fat so much, just cook them in duck fat. Here's the problem, animal fats are good but they unfortunately tend to have what we call a low smoking point which is to say that they start burning and turning rancid just when regular vegetable oils are getting warmed up. So the trick is to get the duck fat flavor into the fry, take it out, get it somehow in there and then finish the fry a separate time in a very hot Canola oil. Now I am going to cook these French fries for a fairly brief period of time and once I see that they've got a little bit of color on them, I'm going to scoop them out with this antique looking device and I am going to put them on a paper and I am going to put them over in the refrigerator. I want all the duck fat on the outside to congeal. When the duck fat congeals, it makes an armor of animal fat flavor which will then absorb into the potato as it cooks in the hot fat. So a couple of minutes later these French fries have been blanched, that is to say they're not really cooked, they're still basically raw but they have a little bit of color on them and most importantly, they are greasy. So I have all that good duck fat on them. Now I'm going to take them over and I'm going to stick them in the refrigerator or better still the freezer for a good couple of hours. Alright so now I have here some cold French fries. They are raw on the inside and you can't really see it too visibly, but they are totally covered with cold coagulated duck fat. It's white but it's not butter but it smells good and tastes better, so I'm going to take these French fries and I have this really super hot oil here. Any of these kind of high class vegetable oils will do the job. I think this one is Canola, alright that's it, that's it get in there. As soon as you put them in they float to the top. These are not going to take long to cook I mean they're basically half done already. All they need now is to get a little bit of a crust on the outside. Essentially what's going to happen is that the Canola oil is going to seal in the duck oil. There's going to be a double jacket of fat. It's going to turn crunchy fast but what's going to happen is that because the potato went in cold, it's actually not going to cook through and become that dried out chalky nasty potato that you sometimes get. Oh boy look at this, wow is that hot and what's so cool about these is that they look kind of like they're burnt or whatever or over cooked but they're incredibly perfect. This is a genius French fry that was not my invention but rather came to me via Amanda Freitag, she deserves all the credit for it. I mean maybe she ripped it off from somebody but she was the one that I saw make it. These are now wonderfully greasy and delicious, oh let's have a little salt, duck fat French fries. I'm Josh Ozersky for eHow.com.