[Lifestyle] How to eat: loaded fries

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This month, How to Eat is ordering loaded fries. Is this a meal or a side? Which chips best defy the sogginess? And is it ever possible to have too much cheese n food, there is very little that has not been documented in incredible detail. Google anything from apple pie to zucchini, and your search will return endless recipes, exhaustive histories and examinations of said item’s cultural resonance.Information about loaded fries, however, is notable by its absence. You can unearth fragments of the 1950s origin story, which involves a precocious 16-year-old Texas genius creating chilli cheese fries. But whereas Canada’s Quebecers proudly celebrate poutine – a dish of chips, fresh curds and gravy – there is a distinct lack of curiosity about the timeline that gave the United States pizza fries or post-clubbing disco fries.This is despite loaded fries now being a staple of menus, not just in New York, but in faraway Norwich and Aberdeen. The US has exported outrageously topped fries to the world.Are loaded fries somehow beyond the pale, too simple, too calorific, too unsophisticated to warrant investigation? Is disregarding them the last acceptable snobbery? A bit like Blur, Banksy or Breaking Bad, loaded fries are kind of cool, good fun and po[CENSORED]r, but it seems no one is quite sure if we should take them seriously.You might say it would take a particularly shallow food column to go deep on this topic. So here we go. How to Eat, the series defining how best to enjoy our favourite foods, is here to pick through the tangled mess that is loaded fries. 

 

 

The inflationary greed of the (ugh!) “dude food” era, the more-is-more mantra of the Man v Food epoch, their nudge-nudge proximity to burgers on restaurant menus, have all helped to position loaded fries as a side dish. This is erroneous.Both from a volume and a boredom perspective, you do not need a portion of loaded fries with a burger. You do not even need to share one. That combination is both repetitive (pair your hunk of meat and carbs with another hillock of meat and carbs!), and creates a confusing crossfire of flavours if your fries are loaded with a radically different topping.Essentially, you are eating two meals at once, which, while it sounds good, frequently leaves you nauseous, bewildered and nine quid worse off. Think of loaded fries as a meal in itself.FriesIdeally, you want to eat loaded fries with your fingers. A key appeal of this dish is that it allows you to disavow parental authority and the arid discipline of the bourgeois western dining table – and dig greedily and unapologetically in with your fingers.Loaded fries are food’s equivalent of finger painting, mud baths or four days without showering at a music festival – a return to a more uninhibited sense of ourselves and our tactile pleasures. That desire to get hands-on requires fries that can both support their own weight and act as delivery mechanism – part nacho, part chopsticks.Here, fries are food and utensil. A requirement that rules out traditional British chips on a spectrum from chunky, chain-pub chips to soft, golden chip-shop numbers. Too long, too limp, prone to sogginess and liable to break as you lift them, such chips cannot be relied upon to carry heavy loads.Instead, look to the chip world’s extremes. What you need as a base for your load is either thin french fries (squeezed between two fingers they form a convenient fanned scoop) or for heavier, wetter loads, glassy, crunchy, triple-cooked chips (they are more robust and have a slower rate of absorption).Properly browned and encased in a crisp crust of starches and sugars, such chips will withstand excess moisture without becoming waterlogged and, rather than a potato flavour, will be notable for their caramelised, sweet, buttery fried character. This is not a dish in which you want elemental flavours of the land. If you want an overt potato flavour, bake one. Loaded fries should be a rich, indulgent feast.Note: yes, you may need to use a fork on the last few sodden mouthfuls (and that is a good thing – you want a variety of textures through this meal), but that will only be at the load’s core. Not before. Sweet potato fries have no place in loaded fries. See also: curly fries, overly literal matchstick fries, wedges, earthy skin-on interlopers.

Link: https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/sep/21/how-to-eat-loaded-fries