8.24.2006

I have had the pleasure of eating horse meat, It is by far
considered the biggest honor a host can do for a guest of high prestige in the
Arab peninsula, is to ...well ... kill one of his horses to feed his guests.
But by gosh darn, I missed out on the fat.

On Horse Fat, Fries, and Harold McGee
horsey



Last week I wrote a little post about one of our cooking adventures while in the South of France last year, where we cooked our first batch of fries in horse fat, which our friend Mikael sourced from one of the horse butchers in Nice. Jeffrey Steingarten who is one of my favorite food writers –I have a soft spot for grumpy old men, especially the pedantic ones- also wrote about horse fat fries in one of his columns in Vogue magazine a while back.

Quite a few of you left comments and emails, asking what about the horse fat that makes it such a great medium for fried potatoes. Alas I had no idea. I could only tell you what I tasted. Frankly, I was quite curious about it myself.

And so I thought who'd be better to ask than Harold McGee? So I did. I fired off and email to Harold, who promptly wrote back:

Can you describe how the fries were different, or especially good? Horse fat is actually sort of intermediate between solid animal fats and liquid vegetable oils. It's harder (more saturated) than the latter, but softer than tallow or lard, not too different from chicken or duck or goose fat. So I wonder whether it was maybe a difference in the flavor more than the texture? Because I don't see how the consistency of the fat itself would make a distinctive difference in the texture of the fries. Tell me what you remember about them, and I'll see how good of a rationalization I can come up with!

Hey, I usually get by with random guesses or just outright make things up, so a rationalization would do me just fine, especially one from Harold McGee.

So I replied with my best recollection of the experience:

The fries were really delicious. It's hard to describe why I suppose, since it may have to do with the type of potato we used as well. We used Ratte Mona Lisa potatoes, by the way. The oil itself stank to high heaven during the rendering, but produced a beautiful, dark golden oil that had a strong, complex, almost meaty flavor to it. I was worried that the fries would somehow tasted 'horsey', which I suspected I wouldn't like. They didn't, luckily. They only tasted like fried potatoes, but with a deeper flavor than just regular cooked potatoes. They crisp up beautifully though, didn't crisp through and through but had a nice but not super crunchy skin and a soft, perfectly cooked inside.

powered by performancing firefox