Home › Meat Substitutes › Potato Puffs
Potato Puffs
Wash and peel the potatoes. Cut them in slices an eighth of an inch thick and the length of the potato, making the slices as nearly of the same size as possible. Put them in ice water for twenty minutes, drain and dry thoroughly on a soft cloth. Cook them in deep hot oil for a few minutes. Take them out, allow the oil to become smoking hot, put in the slices again and fry to a golden brown, when they will puff into balls. Drain on a paper, sprinkle with salt and discard any that do not puff. The best results are attained with Holland potatoes.
This is pommes soufflées, one of the few potato preparations where success rate matters more than technique. Expect a proportion of failures even when everything is done right.
- The hinge: two distinct oil temperaturesThe recipe gives no figures, but modern practice for this dish uses a moderate first fry (roughly 300F) so the interior cooks and steams without the surface setting hard, then a much hotter second fry (roughly 375-400F) so the trapped steam expands faster than the crust can resist. Frying both times at the same heat is generally held to be why slices fail to puff.
- Thickness is not negotiableThickness matters -- an eighth of an inch is what the recipe specifies, and it is worth following: much thicker slices tend not to inflate, much thinner ones behave like chips. A mandoline helps, and cutting lengthwise down the potato as directed keeps the cross-section even.
- "Holland potatoes"Probably a market term for Dutch table potatoes, though the reference is not certain. A firm, even-textured all-purpose or yellow-fleshed variety is a reasonable modern stand-in; opinions differ on how starchy the potato should be for this dish.
- Ice water, then bone dryThe soak removes surface starch so the slices do not glue together. Drying is equally important: any surface water will spit violently in oil at 400F and can prevent a clean seal forming on the slice.
- Between the two friesThe recipe reads as though the slices go straight back in. In practice they should cool at least ten minutes, and can rest an hour or more, which gives a firmer skin and a better puff.
- Deep hot oilThe recipe calls for oil in a deep pan. Any oil with a smoke point above about 425F works; peanut and refined sunflower are reliable. Do not judge readiness by "smoking hot" as written, since oil that is actually smoking is past its useful point. Use a thermometer.
- Discarding the failuresThe instruction to throw out unpuffed slices is honest rather than fussy. A proportion will fail even for experienced cooks; those are perfectly edible fried potatoes and worth eating rather than binning.
- Yield and timingTiming -- serve within minutes of the second fry: the puffs soften and collapse as they cool and cannot be revived.
Pommes soufflées are traditionally traced to the French railway kitchens of the 1830s, where a delayed train is said to have forced a cook to pull potatoes from the fat and return them to hotter oil, producing the accidental balloon. The story should be taken as trade legend rather than documented fact. What is certain is that by the time this book was printed the dish had become a standard mark of a skilled fry cook, and here it appears under the heading "Meat Substitutes."