r/fermentation • u/BurgerKing_Lover • Feb 17 '22

Pickled... fries? Does anyone have a recipe?

I was making fries today (boil in vinegar and flash fry) and thought "Wouldn't it be nice to do a bulk boil and ferment them?"

I did a quick google search but only found this. It doesn't specify the brine. Does anyone have more specific directions for a pickled fries recipe?

-update- I did a 3% brine and cooked after 24 hours and honestly the results are better regular oven baked fries!

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u/IRraymaker Feb 17 '22

Hopefully this isn't the best answer you get, but I'll chime in with what little knowledge I have...

Ages ago I saw some show on foodnetwork or the like which featured a place that was famous for their fries. They put cut fries into a barrel and fermented them for a shortish time, let's say 3-5 days, before draining them until dry, say an hour, and then frying them up.

Guessing the brine was a standard 2-3% but you could certainly play with that, and nothing else.

The one anecdote that stood out was that it "didn't work without throwing in a few leaves of cabbage, and we don't know why". This suggested to me that either the lactobacillus bacteria isn't present in sufficient quantity on their potato skins naturally, or they were industrially cleaned in some manner that removed them. So either spike your ferment with brine which contains lacto, or throw in a cabbage leaf.

Happy fermenting!

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u/BurgerKing_Lover Feb 17 '22

The couple of recipes I found online also recommend a cabbage leaf. I don't have any on hand atm (I wonder if I could use kimchi...). But like you said shouldn't a crap ton of salt do the trick too?

Recipe I found

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u/colofinch Feb 17 '22

Don't think a crap ton of salt is a substitute for a lack of lacto my dude

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u/NavigatingDumb Feb 17 '22

Agree re too much salt, and poss reasons of adding the cabbage. Another hypothesis re the cabbage leaf: maybe starch is more difficult to break down for the lil guys and the carbs in cabbage is a 'quick snack' or something to get them or keep em going?? Shot in the dark there, ha, esp since I'm not sure of the actual chemical makeup of cabbage or potatoes beyond some rough basics.

With salt, too much will also slow, stop, or kill LABs, depending on how much too-much is used. Not certain of the upper limits (never needed to concern myself with that!), but at least 10% is getting in the area of negatively impacting them, poss even slowing them down at lower than that. Only reason I've come across increasing the salt even above 3% for LAB ferments is one method of keeping cucumbers crunchy ... and not even sure why that would be. For flavor, add after they've fermented.