Chips

Before I start, let me clarify. Chips. By this I mean chunks of potato, which are usually deep fried, although more on that later. I don’t mean Crisps, which are wafer-thin slices of potato adorned with various chemicals to give them flavour, and supplied in a packet. If you’re from the USA, I mean French Fries. But if you’re not, I don’t mean that, because to me and my fellow countrymen French Fries are pencil-thin strips of some kind of cheap potato-substitute that are served up by that fast-food clown. French Fries are also a brand of Crisp.

So, with that clarified, I will continue my discussion of chips. Chips at home traditionally have been frozen chips, i.e. you get a bag out of the freezer, pour the contents into the deep fat fryer (a vat of hot fat, either animal or vegetable) and assuming the hot fat doesn’t become the seat of a blaze that destroys your house, you eat them some time later.

Now, when I was a child, they invented Oven Chips. These were a remarkable invention – you would get them out of the freezer, put them in the oven (a cupboard of hot air) and eat them some time later. Blazes are much rarer in ovens than in deep fryers, and also it’s much more convenient, cleaner and healthier. In other words, these Oven Chips were a technological marvel, and proclaimed as such by the manufacturers.

Fast forward many years…

We like to eat chips occasionally, when we can’t be bothered to cook properly, but I won’t have a deep fat fryer in the house for various reasons. Thankfully, the technical marvel that is Oven Chips came to the rescue, and for a time we purchased and used them. However, it’s fair to say that Oven Chips in a packet are rubbish, as in fact are any kind of frozen chip. The best kind are the ones my dad used to make – big chunks of roughly hewn potato deep-fried to perfection. But how to reproduce this without a deep fat frier? Surely it’s impossible, without some technical wizardry.

But actually no, making good chips is easy. It’s easier than using the ‘convenient’ Oven Chips out of the freezer. At the simplest level, take some potatoes, wash and peel (the peeling is optional actually, don’t bother) and then chop them into whatever shapes and sizes take your fancy. Make sure they’re dry, place in a baking tray, and toss them around in a small amount of olive oil. Stick them in the oven, and get them out when they’re ready.

Easy.

Of course, you can get more advanced than this once you’ve got the hang of the basics, but that’s a subject for another post.

So what was all the fuss about Oven Chips? What’s all the messing about with deep fat fryers? Why bother with frozen chips at all. What’s the point of this post? I can’t answer any of these questions and I’m not even going to try.