FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Consolidated "Air Fryer - Experiences, Questions, Recipes" thread
Old Aug 6, 2012, 6:36 am
  #55  
tentseller
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Originally Posted by uk1
This may be of interest to some rather boring people like me who research these things ..... and may explain why the Airfryer unexpectedly does such a good job.

I became obsessed some years ago about producing the perfect, but healthy chip. To be honest there are I believe a lot of myths that generalise that all fried food is unhealthy but this isn't true. Food fried properly can be nearly as healthy as other foods - certainly not as bad as the press they always get. At the same time I also became obsessed with batter for the fish .... but that was a two year journey of discovery and dissapointments and eurekas ..... and the topic for a completely different thread ...... I simply wanted to produce perfect fish and chips at home that were better than we could buy at the best places ... but also reasonably healthy.

But back to the chips! What I really wanted was a really gorgeous crisp chip with the flavour of olive oil, but with no saturated fat inside. So far as this chip journey was concerned I experimented with every method I could find and there seemed to me to be a bit of an issue with reconciling the taste of the chip with how healthy it was. Because the taste relied on it seemed two factors ie the caramelisation of the sugars on the surface causing the crispness and the amount of fat saturated into the core of the chip adding flavour to the middle. As it happens, if you can find a way of making a chip crisp on the outside but not saturated with fat on the inside you have a relatively healthy but lovely chip albeit without maxing out on the internal fat taste. Hence my journey of discovery .....

To cut a very long story short I worked quite hard at this even installing an industrial twin fryer in the kitchen but not really making the progress I'd hoped. I eventually came across a chap completing a PHD in New Zealand who was interested in the fat saturation of chips ie how healthy or unhealthy they were compared to how they had been prepared. In simple terms he bought a portion of chips from as many places as he could in Wellington and analysed the fat content. He then correlated this against how they had been prepared.

The conclusion he reached was unexpected. He (and I.....) had thought that what made the chip saturated was by frying them in a lower temperature oil so that they absorbed the fat. Instinctively I'd presumed the higher the frying temperature the lower the fat drawn into the chip causing saturation because the high temperature seals the chip before it absorbs. These ideas are I believe the commonly held ideas by most people interested in the topic but it seems we are all wrong.

Evidently what causes the chip to be saturated is the amount of water on the surface when you cook it. It is the surface water that draws the fat in it seems. So for example if you blanche the chip, let it cool and completely dry, then flash fry you will end up with a chip with crispness with a fluffy but relatively low flavour but low fat saturated core. But you cannot use olive oil for flavour because of the low smoke point. So even with this method the flavour will come from relatively neutral tasting oils like sunflower or other vegetable oils. The Blumenthal method adds flavour and saturation by adding a low temperature cooking time to the initial blanching followed by the chips now with surface oil being re-fried at a higher tempreature. The final fry will pull in fats into the core because you have oil on the surface of the chip to draw more oil in.

The air fryer used optimally means that you boil or steam the potatos first, then let them cool and dry but then use olive oil to coat the chips. This seems to cause crispness and caramelised olive oil flavour to the surface but leaves the core fluffy and fat free. The lower smoke point of olive oil seems to work in your favour here because they crisp more easily and therefore the flavour and crunch seem even better. As you cannot successfully deep fry chips with olive oil because of the low smoke point, the AirFryer seems (unexpectedly) to me to be the best method I have found to cook a perfectly flavoured and healthy olive oil flavoured chip.
Are you Mr. Heston Blumenthal posting under an alias?
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