Making Homemade French Fries Cooking Recipe Part 1

Video Transcript

"I'm Louis Ortiz on behalf of Expert Village and today we are going to show you how to make some French fries from scratch. What we are going to use is a double frying method and double frying in the sense that we want to blanch these at a lower temperature first and then we want to raise the temperature and finish the cooking process. So I've just got some parchment paper here and a Pyrex dish and once these are finished the first stage of cooking, the blanching, I am going to go ahead and lay these guys in here side by side and we are actually going to chill them a little bit. They are going to get a nice little gummy finish from the starch that has started to come out of them and there is some residual moisture in there too that makes it a really nice gummy finish on the outside as they chill. I've got my counter top fryer set to 320 and so we are going to start them at 320 to blanch and then I am going to raise the temperature up to about 360 and will finish cooking them at the higher temperature. They are going to come out real nice for us. So I've just got some Russet Potatoes here which I've peeled and I've got a Santoku knife and I am going to square these off first, so that we've got a nice safe foundation which to cut our French fries on. I'm just going to make a cut from the top to the bottom here. Just keep simple. We all know what French fries look like and the French called these Pontineuf; if you ever run across that in a cookbook, which you may. Just a fancy word for French fry. Going to square this off a little bit shorter, make it a little safer to cut with. You can also use a slicer for these if you so desire. Today I am showing you with a knife just in case. So you notice I squared these off so that I've got a nice firm base which to cut the other sections. Just take it slow. You want that knife falling across your fingers or the potatoes slipping out from under you. Just keep these as uniformed as possible so that you will have a nice even cooking time for all of your French fries. Okay. These are going to be kind of Russet and home style. They don't necessarily have to be incredible symmetrical unless you feel that's necessary. So I am going to square this off. This will count as a French fry and I am going to cut the rest of these about this size so that we've got them nice and symmetrical. Again, this is going to facilitate the cooking process that they are all done at the same time. Square this guy off. All right. There is a good start. I'm going to let these rest in some cool water in a bowl so they don't turn brown while I cut the rest of these and we will come back and show you how to start the blanching procedure and show you what they need to look like once the branch part has been done. We will go from there."