I Made These Fries and Ketchup From Worth It

hello welcome to my kitchen my name is andrew and in this video i'm making fries and i'm making ketchup that sounds boring let me explain now you may know me from this other show called worth it where me and my pals steven and adam go around eating different foods at different price points to see which is the most worth it and in making that show i've developed this insatiable curiosity for why great foods taste great i think one of the best ways to satisfy that curiosity is to recreate some of my favorite foods from the show for myself to see what's going on in the recipe you know to drill in on the fundamentals of why something tastes good maybe i'll learn something maybe i want i don't know so the fries that i want to make come from our sandwiches episode and from a restaurant called the oinkster we were primarily looking at their pastrami sandwich which is incredible but the oyster also makes these unbelievable fries and they also make all of their own condiments including ketchup when i think of ketchup i think red sugar that comes in a bottle children put it on everything end of story but for a restaurant to actually make their own and to hone the flavor the way that they want is really quite fascinating and also what is ketchup anyway i mean if tomato is a fruit is ketchup really like a jelly to start off i'm going to be speaking with chef andre from the oinkster to learn a little bit more about their ketchup and their fries hey chef andre nice to see you hey andrea good to see you i'm i'm here to talk about your ketchup which i love so much yeah ketchup is like an essential part of american life what do you see in the flavor of ketchup that had an opportunity to be enhanced i think when you you eat certain foods that have been processed or that have been sitting in a can or a jar there's a little bit of a staleness to it our fries were so good and i thought well i don't want to just buy any ketchup but i didn't want to make something so weird that people would say well it's kind of like ketchup but it isn't i remember going to this fancy food show bringing home a bunch of samples of all these what they call artisan old ketchups andrew none of this stuff tasted good to me i mean it's interesting but when it came down to it i just i wanted a basic ketchup we all have some kind of a reference memories from our childhood about how things were or how we think they work you want to strive for elevating that standard how can you make that standard even better when i first made it i thought well it tastes like ketchup when i started tasting it side by side against other ketchup it's like wow this is really sharper it's the flavors are brighter thank you so much for your time thanks for sharing the recipes with me i'm looking forward to making this stuff for myself i you know curious to see how it turns out for you i've acquired the ingredients some were more difficult to get than others but we'll get to that later but my conversation with chef andre also got me thinking about you know what is the nature of ketchup what is this stuff and this led chef andre to share a very interesting anecdote with me looking at ketchup in a more abstract lens my head goes to fruit preserves tomatoes i think are technically a fruit you eat it for its sweetness what do you think about that yes you know i our brains you know we're looking for balance it's like yin and yang so that's what jam does when you put jam on a piece of toast when i was a kid i used to you know drink coffee with my dad in the morning and he would do these things i i thought it was kind of weird and quirky but he would make toast and he would smear butter and he would get this really sharp blue cheese but then you add orange marmalade to it and i don't know why that that flavor combination just stuck with me and it's like a little lesson in contrast and balance i'm telling you try it sometime and it's it's really amazing combination [Music] yeah it's delightful it's wonderful although foods can seem very different usually they're all trying to accomplish the same thing contrasting flavors harmonizing flavors sweet cheese i also think that it is very necessary when embarking on a new cooking project to give yourself a little snack at the beginning because you don't know how long it's going to be until you get to eat that final thing so we're going to put together the ketchup now which is actually fairly straightforward so we have a whole bunch of tomato paste i wonder how many tomatoes go into an ounce of tomato paste it must be a lot some white wine vinegar the sugar is also a key difference from what you would find in store-bought ketchup we're using cane sugar you know it's like drinking a mexican coke in a bottle versus coke and you get that little nuanced flavors you get maybe a little bit of ginger notes in the mexican coke and the the sweetness is is a little sharper and cleaner and then you know we have some spices uh there's cinnamon and allspice a little nutmeg it's uh very subtle but it's there it's also worth noting that i'm using the oysters recipe which is for their large-scale restaurant amount of ketchup i think sometimes flavors don't scale proportionally so i'm also just using the general proportions as a guideline and then doing it to my own taste as well so then we have a bunch of salt and then there's also some corn syrup which is mainly for texture so now we're basically bringing this to a simmer it'll simmer for 30 or 40 minutes and that will be it okay it's time to make the fries there's a certain despair that maybe you've felt before it's when you have a recipe and it requires a particular ingredient and you think oh i might have to go to a couple stores for this and then you hit that third or fourth store these fries have three of those ingredients two of them are the cooking fats which we'll talk about in a second but the main one is the potato itself you want to get cannonbacked potatoes i don't know if you know this but most of the cannabis that are grown in the united states go to processing laced potato chips and building it on fries i love in and out because those potatoes taste like potatoes it's very difficult to get consistent cannonback potatoes all year round if you take a potato and you refrigerate it it'll develop more sugars the sugar caramelizes you don't want the sugar you want more of a starchy potato so after asking the oinkster for some help it suggested going to the downtown los angeles wholesale produce area and i found these potatoes and it was such a glorious feeling the thing is i could only buy them in a 50 pound quantity i like fist pumped when i got the potatoes the guy who ran the shop was like so you're gonna pay for these or what anyway i was so amped decided to treat myself to some uh tacos around the corner amazing vendor making carnitas got myself a couple victory tacos and here we are today look at that potato this thing is a weapon this is like a prehistoric potato you know when they show renderings of like how big an alligator was when dinosaurs were still alive this is the potato version of that i don't have a automatic fry making thing so i'm going to be cutting these by hand okay let's just start this is now like the size of a large potato i'm just going to cut these into large planks and then cut those in two sticks so i'm just gonna store these in cold water while i get everything else set up as they do at the restaurants oh my god that was only half of a potato i forgot that i cut this potato in half oh my god what am i gonna do with these potatoes okay so we're actually gonna fry these fries in two stages the first is going to be in beef tallow beef towel was also pretty difficult to find so i ended up asking a butcher who's actually previously been on worth it's a place called gwen gwen actually had wagyu beef tallow so added bonus loading the cups of wagyu beef tallow into this pot is a great experience even if my fries come out like crap that alone lots of fun so we're starting the fries at a lower temperature blanching it for about nine minutes and then we're going to swap to a different oil just gently moving things around so i'm getting less bubbles now and i thought that it might have something to do with the temperature but i think it's actually that the moisture in the potatoes is leaving i can already tell they have like this crispy airiness to them okay so there's all my blanched fries i can't believe that this was a single potato so next we're swapping to rice bran oil which is apparently the type of oil that's used when frying tempura the oil is now up to temperature what's interesting is it really actually has a fragrance of rice to it which seems obvious because it's derived entirely from rice but smells are fun i can hear them clacking together because of their crispness oh this sound do you it's like rolling dice oh my god i was probably gonna edit out me sneaking a fry there but wow that was good look at these fries the sound of them is just it's intoxicating the golden color it's it's beautiful with potatoes okay ketchup i have quite a lot of ketchup now i'm gonna pick a choice fry here you can't just have one fry you can't obviously there's inconsistencies in my cutting so the smaller ones are a bit crunchier some of the bigger ones are just perfect and now for some ketchup it's so good it's hard to describe its flavor other than it tastes more chef andre did suggest taste this side by side with store-bought ketchup so we have the good old they know how to make ketchup that's for sure the freshly made stuff is just a little bit more alive the taste of vinegar the taste of the spices and what's interesting is that when the differences between two things are subtle it's still just as important as if the differences were large what an amazing deal it is to go to a place and get this without having to go through all that trouble and effort the crazy thing is that these fries are so good you don't even need ketchup check out the oinster in eagle rock amazing food highly recommend thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: About To Eat

Views: 550,312

Rating: 4.9702444 out of 5

Keywords: K_fe, Recipe, Recipe Recreation, Tasty, about to eat, baking, breakfast, breakfast recipes, buzzfeed, buzzfeed tasty, cooking, dessert, dinner, dinner recipes, easy breakfast recipes, easy cooking, easy recipes, eating, fast food, food, food porn, fries, fun recipes, healthy breakfast recipes, how to, how to bake, how to cook, ketchup, kid-friendly, kid-friendly recipes, lunch, lunch recipes, quarantine, quarantine recipes, social distancing, tasty recipes, worth it

Id: nUSI5uUocho

Length: 12min 21sec (741 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021