When Emily Quick was looking for the perfect overture to a menu devoted to artisanal salts, she decided the simplest solution is best, and she went with potato chips.
“They’re something that’s not so different, but they’re really practical,” says Quick of Starfire Catering. “They’re a great way to experiment with different flavors.”
For the “Lords of Salt” event, priced at $45 per person, at Foster & Dobb’s retail food shop in Portland, Ore., Quick prepared two types of potato chips tossed with serrano-lime salt and kalamata olive salt. As guests arrived they were greeted with little bags of each kind of chip, along with what Quick calls a “Beerita,” a beer-based cocktail made with citrus fruit juice and served in a glass rimmed with the serrano-lime salt.
“The chips were really well-received by the dinner guests,” Quick says. “They came out beautifully, and you could really taste the brightness of the flavors.”
Potato chips may be the most famous variety, but chefs can make crisps with just about anything in the kitchen, allowing them to dress up their dishes with unexpected flavors and textures.
Two kinds of chips, made from chorizo and garlic, embellish an appetizer of baby Montauk calamari ala plancha at Eighty One in New York. To prepare the dish, which sells for $16, chef-owner Ed Brown splits fresh Montauk calamari and tosses the pieces with olive oil and bruised garlic to give it a little flavor, then he doses the dish with plenty of pimenton de la vera, smoked paprika made by drying peppers slowly over a smoldering fire and pulverizing them into a smoky, flavored powder. He cooks the seafood for less than 45 seconds on a mirror-finished chrome griddle called a plancha.
“The plancha is a very traditional way of cooking that I saw in Spain many years ago,” Brown says. “The beauty of the plancha is that it is a large cooking surface, so it doesn’t lose its heat so fast. So instead of starting at a superhot temperature and singeing the protein, you can start at a medium temperature and just kind of toast the protein.”
After cooking the calamari on the plancha, Brown plates it with a sauce of leeks, garlic, potatoes and stock, which he says is like a thin vichyssoise. He tops that with chips made of chorizo and garlic. To make the chorizo chips he takes a hard Spanish chorizo, thinly slices it and dries the pieces slowly in the oven so they become crispy chips that pack an intense punch of flavor.
For his sweet garlic chips, Brown blanches garlic slivers in milk three times before frying them in a shallow pan with olive oil.
“When you blanch them in milk, what happens is that you get a very mild flavor,” Brown says. “You could eat these by the handful, and they taste good, versus them being too strong. Very often, if you fry them without blanching they become bitter.
“I wanted to put another component into the dish, so I looked for an ingredient in the dish that I could bring out and make part of the presentation,” he says. “The garlic chips add a crunchy texture, but also the garlic is a perfect match for both the calamari and the potato sauce, and there’s plenty of garlic in the flavor profile of the chorizo, so it’s got a very natural reason for being there.… The calamari is probably one of our best-selling signature dishes.”
Ricky Estrellado, executive chef of Nobu in Manhattan’s Tribeca area, uses garlic chips to add character to several menu items. He prepares a salad of shiitake mushrooms and poached lobster with mesclun in a spicy dressing made from lemon juice, grapeseed oil, garlic purée and black peppers, garnished with crispy garlic chips. It is served cold and sells for $39.
Nobu also features garlic chips on a whitefish sashimi dish that is priced at $18. A white fish, such as fluke, sea bass or Japanese snapper, is thinly sliced and then drizzled with olive oil and yuzu juice and topped with dried miso, chives and garlic chips.
Estrellado discovered garlic chips when he first got into Asian cooking.
“If you go to an Asian market, you can find garlic chips for sale in bottles,” he says.
To make garlic chips, Estrellado fries thin slices of garlic in cottonseed oil over a low flame, stirring them with chopsticks so they don’t stick together.
“We cook them until they are golden brown,” he says. “Any longer and they get bitter. This way they have a nice garlic flavor. In some places they blanch it in milk so the garlic flavor is not as strong, but I like that strength. So I don’t do it that way.”
At Nobu’s sister restaurants, Nobu 57 in midtown Manhattan and Nobu Miami Beach, garlic slivers are blanched in milk before they’re fried until crispy.
Estrellado also makes chips by frying sliced shiitake mushrooms in cottonseed oil, letting them dry until they are crispy and adding a little salt. He says their flavor is so similar to bacon he calls them “shiitake bacon” and uses them as a garnish for wagyu Japanese beef on the Nobu tasting menu.
Mushroom chips also enhance Kobe beef sashimi at David Burke’s Primehouse in the James Hotel in Chicago. There executive chef Rick Gresh takes sliced button mushrooms and deep fries them until they are crunchy.
“They get nice and crispy and a really good golden brown, and it just adds that nice earthy mushroom flavor to the dish,” he says.
The dish itself is Kobe beef sliced thin and set on a block of Himalayan pink salt so it seasons while it sits there. Then it is drizzled with truffle oil and topped with chives, crostini and truffle mayo.
“The mushroom chips are like a little treat on top,” Gresh says. The Kobe beef sashimi sells for $15.
Danny Trace, executive chef of Commander’s Palace in Destin, Fla., uses sweet chips to add tropical accents to the restaurant’s modern, haute Creole menu. Trace’s West Indies blue-crab salad is made with hearts of palm, spicy mango ribbons, papaya, avocado and spiced-sugarcane vinaigrette with coconut chips for $11.
Crispy fruit chips also make an appearance on his assiette of Florida ceviche. The coconut and lime ceviche, which Trace says they often use with grouper, is garnished with coconut chips. Pineapple chips accent a pineapple and ginger beer marinade that is frequently used with red snapper.
To prepare the coconut and pineapple chips, Trace slices the fruit and dusts it with confectioner’s sugar. The pieces are left to dry in a low-temperature oven until they are crispy.
“We eat tons of them,” Trace says. “The chefs just walk around the stations, and I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but we can destroy some mise en places. That’s for sure.”
