Monday, March 15, 2010

Croquettes de pommes de terre/Potato Puffs


SUNDAY, MARCH 7, 2010

We have a friend with a massive garden. Among the things he grows are something like 16 varieties of potatoes! Little ones, big ones, waxy ones, ones for baking, yellow, white, and some with a deep purple center with a white ring around the outside. Beautiful! I’ve used them for roasting and to make potato leek soup. Lydie has written a whole cookbook devoted soley to potatoes so I guess she knows her way around a potato. The cookbook of this project has only a few potato recipes. It’s the night of the Oscars and I thought it would be a good time to munch on croquettes de pommes de terre or potato puffs. I would be serving them along side a large salad. (My way of compensating for the fat consumed in the potatoes.)

I’m not one to seek out deep frying experiences. For one thing, I hate to use all that oil only once and then discard it. I also try to avoid the calories and health risks of deep frying. Yes, I know that if you get the oil to the right temperature and flash fry the item it doesn’t really absorb that much oil.

So, I have to admit I entered this project with a few misgivings and with some half-hearted preparation. I only poured a couple of inches of vegetable oil into the skillet, not the quart of oil the recipe called for. Secondly, I’ve never invested in a thermometer for deep frying seeing as how I never thought I’d be doing much of it. So, I didn’t really know if I got the oil hot enough.

Well, the result reflected my ambivalence. The potatoes were tasty, but, to my taste, a little greasy. The one thing that amazed me once again is the alchemy of mashed potatoes and flour. Incredibly, these two ingredients resulted in a dough one could quite easily roll out and cut with a cookie cutter into rounds to be deep fried.

In the hands of a deep frying aficionado perhaps this would be a nice recipe. Me, I think I will leave the deep frying to someone else.

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