Pop starch
The potato - and other carbohydrate parts of the restaurant plate - may be getting some waspish press comment from the slimming lobby, but it remains the UK's favourite vegetable. The chef that doesn't offer potatoes on a British-styled menu because the menu is trying to be different is in the same kind of commercial danger as the chef who refuses to offer steak on a Saturday night because it's boring.
Part of the appeal of potatoes is the versatility in cooking compared with other carbohydrate staples. Escoffier listed more than 80 potato dishes he worked with when he published his Le Guide Culinaire 100 years ago, and the recipes didn't include the 101 things to add to mashed potato so popular on restaurant menus today.
Adding flavours is where manufacturers of potato products see business growth. "The main innovation will be in tastes," says Mark Robson, marketing manager of Farm Frites. He sees mashed potato products becoming much more varied, as restaurants look to offer something other than parsley, garlic or spring onion as flavourings.
He believes there will be a fusion of British mashed potato with flavours associated with other countries - such as Italian-themed spinach and cheese noisettes or Asian flavours such as a Thai-inspired lime and chilli mashed potato.
Robson adds that while dusted coatings on chips have been around for a few years, production development is only a step away from a curry sauce chip, with a curry batter holding in the curry sauce. A similar production process could put mayonnaise or gravy within the chip.
Instant mashed potato might not be something white-tablecloth restaurants care to think about, but it is extremely useful for the institutional sector. The cold-mix instant mash from the Maggi division of Nestl‚ Foodservice has proved a huge success in cook-chill production. Mid-Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust has a central preparation unit at Pinderfields hospital in Wakefield that uses 1,200kg a week of Maggi cold mix mash. In addition to making mashed potato, it is used as a thickener, in meals for patients with swallowing difficulties and for intensifying nutritional value in patient diets.
Ready-meal provider Apetito, whose main business is also in healthcare, produces a wide range of chilled and frozen main-course dishes, and the company takes more care in potato sourcing than many restaurant chefs. Sandie Patterson, commercial manager for Apetito, says they can use up to 16 different varieties of potato in a year. "Water, sugar and starch content alters from season to season, so that the same variety of potato can taste and perform very differently in July and January," she says.
Chips need the best potatoes
One of the biggest chip users in the UK is Harry Ramsden's, the Compass-owned fish-and-chip restaurant chain. Rather than choose a variety for the time of year, the company chooses soil quality to deliver the best potato. Managing director Garry Cross says they use Maris Piper for 10 months of the year, but source them under contract from farms in Cambridgeshire, where the soil is very well drained and there is a reduced risk of potato rot. The only time they move away from Maris Piper is in late July and August, prior to the annual harvest, when a switch is made to the Dutch Premier variety.
The role of potatoes in a weight-loss plan is bound up in the process of digestion and is an incomplete science. What is not disputed is that deep-frying can result in a chip having a fat content as high as 20% with poor oil and poor frying techniques. Nowhere is there more concern about this than in schools, forever in the gun-barrel sights of politicians and the media.
The dilemma for school caterers is that if they remove chips from the daily menu, there is always the chip shop in the high street or the burger van outside the school gate to fill the gap.
Surrey Commercial Services (SCS), which is responsible for food provision in more than 400 Surrey schools, is experimenting at St Martin's Junior School in Epsom with a way around the chip problem. SCS is taking advantage of the fact that par-fried frozen chips have enough residual fat on them from the par-frying process to enable them to crisp and brown without deep-fat frying. The school is using Rational combi-oven Frybaskets - gastronorm-compatible wire baskets that can cook, brown and crisp 20kg of chips in 10 minutes, using a high heat convection setting on the oven.
Teena Shami, district catering manager for SCS, says they are also using the Frybaskets to cook breaded and battered products. "Like everybody in school meals we are concerned to keep the food as healthy as possible," she says. "It's also a useful marketing tool, because we can assure parents that we are delivering less deep-fried food to children without having to outlaw these products. And, of course, we don't have the expense of oil care."
Apart from the fat issue with deep-fried chips, there is a also smell issue in public areas - a particular problem for pubs. With many pubs now offering all-day food, the smell of the deep-fat fryer either working or idle in a back-bar area can easily drift into the public bar.
The Bishop of Norwich pub in the Moorgate district of London is part of the 44-strong Davy's Wine Bars chain. As well as having food available throughout the day, the pub has the added problem of the kitchen being located in the basement, so that external venting is difficult and the smells of a deep-fat fryer drift upwards into the bar area.
The pub's solution has been to install a Quik'n'Crispy hot-air fryer. Machines such as this are like table-top tumble dryers, with very hot temperatures and blown hot air that uses the residual fat on par-cooked frozen food to brown and crisp.
The smell from chips being cooked has also been addressed by Mono Equipment, which makes a chip vending machine offering McCain chips. The company's latest Fast Fry Vend System can produce a cup of fresh-cooked chips 45 seconds after the money hits the coin mechanism.
The machine is designed to be a 24-hour vending unit, and in this situation the smell from cooking oil could easily outweigh the benefits of on-demand chips. Mono has got around this by using hot-air convection instead of deep-fat frying and designing in a triple filter system to take out most of the cooking smells. Using forced hot air instead of cooking oil also does away with the need for oil maintenance, which was always a drawback with earlier chip vending machines.
Oil care is where many kitchens trip up in chip frying. The working life of cooking oil in a deep-fat fryer is far shorter than many chefs realise - as little as three hours in an own-label (or no-label) standard oil. An extended-life oil will last four to six hours, and even the very best of frying oils are unlikely to give more than nine hours of chip-frying time before the oil breaks down.
One of the ways in which kitchens can maintain chip quality is in maintaining oil quality. Old oil that has broken down gives food a burnt flavour, takes longer to cook and is as unhealthy as it is possible to get. Bob Witherall, general manager for Valentine fryers, says the company is poised to launch a breakthrough in oil testing. (While oil testers are currently available, they are either very expensive or take a long time to reach a result.)
The product Valentine is working on is like a diagnostic dipstick, which gives a reading soon after it is inserted into the oil to say if the oil is still usable or needs changing. "Many chefs just rely on how the oil looks and how it smokes," Witherall says. "That is a poor indication. Chain operations that need consistency of chips in every unit need something much more sophisticated than that. Visual checks might mean oil is being used past its life, or is being thrown away before it should be."
One of the recent advances in ready-prepared chip production has been in the choice of how the caterer buys them. While frozen chips have long dominated the prepared chip market, chilled chips are growing in popularity. Where there is a consistent and predictable high turnover, using chilled saves on storage costs, since they can be held in a fridge at 6-8¡C rather than a freezer at -18°C.
This also leads to lower energy costs, as less energy is needed to keep the oil at the chip frying temperature of 180°C with a chilled product than with a frozen one.
Pasta or potato?
In Italy the carbohydrate of choice is pasta rather than potatoes. Yet there is one classic Italian potato dish that is popular in the UK: gnocchi, a mix of mashed potato and flour. Potato gnocchi are a speciality from the Friuli region of north-east Italy and while there is a universal shape and size for most of the gnocchi available in the UK, in Italy gnocchi are like pasta - they come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, ranging from small peas to square and finger shapes. Italians traditionally serve them with a basic tomato sauce with a dressing of grated hard cheese, but in the Friuli region they also make use of the local walnuts to serve gnocchi with a walnut sauce.
Isabella Gambuzzi, managing director of Mediterranean specialist foods supplier IB Foods, says the Italians take as much care with the potato they use for gnocchi as they do for the eggs and flour they use in making pasta. "The choice of potato is critical," she says. "Good gnocchi need to be made with a potato that has a flaky quality to avoid falling apart during cooking. Because a flaky potato has less moisture, it needs less flour and this means the gnocchi has a more pronounced potato flavour."
The rule for cooking gnocchi is the same as for pasta, Gambuzzi adds. Al dente is the texture to aim for. "Drop them in boiling salted water and when they come to the surface they are done."
