McDonald's French Fry Pie Au Gratin, An Easter Gift
You know what chef Grant Achatz doesn’t eat every night, or, maybe ever?
Helium-filled toffee balloons, one of the signature dishes created by ex-executive (XX? Ex-ex? Double X) chef Mike Bagale for the Alinea tasting menu.
Most chefs probably don’t eat any of the signature dishes they’ve created regularly either.
Historically, four star kitchens have been inhabited by brigades of twenty-somethings working for near minimum wage, many without benefits, which is to say many of these cooks could barely afford their rent and a six pack of PBR living in the world class cities in which they cooked for rich elites.
They couldn’t afford to eat at the places they were cooking at or buy the ingredients they were slinging. Except for learning their craft or studying the competition, why would they want to? They were tasting foie gras and black truffle scraps nightly for quality control. They were tired. Their bones ached. Their backs were tweaked. They wanted comfort. This meant bourbon, bacon, beer, and burgers on Monday (the traditional hospitality weekend night).
This is in part why fine dining is dying. Many chefs said, why the hell am I poaching the eel loin with yak tears and serving it on an edible sneaker made by Virgil Abloh when I can’t and don’t want to eat that way in real life? That’s why they opened ramen shacks, fried chicken joints, and pork belly bun concerns instead.
The same thing happens with food critics. We have somehow managed to embezzle, I mean bamboozle someone in to giving us the GDP of a tiny nation to eat like wealthy elephants. Babar is my homeboy! (Actually, I have legit issues with Babar. You will find if you re-read Babar as an adult, his wife, Celeste, is like his first cousin. Creepy. Cancel Babar!)
If this pandemic does destroy our society and aliens came down fifty years later and analyzed the photo selection on my left behind cell phone, they would likely conclude that my cohort of closely loved others was made up of objects that look like pizza, ribs, and Thai noodles. They might also find that I associated with a lovely woman and two young male earthlings a few times a year, but because the number of photos of those three are dwarfed five hundred to one by snapshots of pastry alone, they would conclude that these three other humans were likely very distant relatives.
I will never own a Ferrari or live on the banks of the ocean in Southern California, but, because some publication was paying the bills, I have eaten food at those levels. I have been incredibly fortunate.
However, even when you’re just eating tangles of pasta or mountains of oysters or eyeball tacos (yes, this happened), dining out can get tiring. Hot Pockets and Totino’s party pizzas become true luxuries. And god damn you if you don’t understand the beauty of a tempura-enrobed chicken McNugget slathered in a peak of hot mustard licked with sweet and sour dipping sauce. And the fries! Yes, for my money, Eddie Lakin’s fries at Edzo’s are the superior and the best in Chicago, but they’re also rich, kind of like an IPA so pumped full of hops it smells like you can roll it and smoke it, whereas the McDonald’s fry is an ice-crystal-level chilled can of Miller High Life. Just as you can take down a sixer of lager, you can eat a trough of McDonald’s fries (even if sadly they aren’t made with beef tallow anymore. If you want to know what that was like, get Publican’s beef suet frites) until you’ve carbo-loaded enough to win the Tour de France.
However, as everyone knows, if you don’t eat McDonald’s within a TikTok video’s time length of receiving your order, the whole meal is stone cold and cardboard tasting. With this in mind, though I was craving a quarantine Big Mac, I reasoned the fries would be worthless. I started flipping through the other delivery options available to me.
But, then I thought, wait, you’re the dude who made Popeye’s Sichuan shrimp last week. That was an exhilarating moment, probably the most alive and alert I felt since the last trip to the grocery store where I acted as if every human within ten feet was the third rail on the El train track.
It turns out MacGyvering fast food is one of the greatest pleasures in the world. It’s like combining all the aspirations of Rachael Ray, Guy Fieri, Thomas Keller and Ronald McDonald in to one super depraved act, like say indulging in forniphilia.
Unless you are Joanna and Chip Gaines of HGTV’s Fixer Upper, who I’m positive pioneered this fetish - I know, because you are a good person, you don’t know what this is. Forniphilia is all about using a person as a piece of furniture, like that time Kim Kardashian made her butt a coffee table to hold that glass of Champagne on the cover of that magazine that was supposed to break the internet.
And so as the king of fetishes that I will now refer to as Chik-fil-ia, I reasoned, Mike, go get that Big Mac, because, you were born to find a superior use for cold McDonald fries, other than as de facto insulation stuck between the cracks of the seats and wheel wells of your Ford Flex as placed there by a toddler five years ago.
It also happens that just last night I was brainstorming Easter dinner possibilities. Easter dinner is an optimistic name this year. Given that this Easter will be spent with my quarantined nuclear family, the dinner should really be named “me and my wife looking at our phones, while our 9 year old looks at his iPad, while our 13 year surveys the spread, grabs two King’s Hawaiian rolls and goes back up to his room to kill drug dealers in Grand Theft Auto” dinner.
That is a mouthful. So, Easter dinner it is. I ordered a HoneyBaked ham, delivered! The classy thing would have been to secure a Benton’s or Broadbent’s country ham, or if he wasn’t stuck at home making such fun meat-related videography on Instagram with his daughter, whatever Rob Levitt of Publican Quality Meats was curing.
But, HoneyBaked is a Nagrant tradition. If you buy a HoneyBaked ham too early and my brother and I have access to it, by the time it’s served on Sunday, it will be balder than Trump’s hairline once you pull back that synthetic golden fleece which is his toupee. Which is to say my brother and I like to break off all of the clove and brown-sugar spiced glaze candy on top. I would buy a box of this cracklin’ goodness, skip the ham and devote myself to veganism were such a product available. But it is not, so I overpaid for ham.
I was also thinking about sides, deciding that this is the year I would give up the ghost, and just order everything out, especially since it is very hard to find basic things at the grocery store. I haven’t checked but I assume French fried-onions are like toilet paper right now.
For Easter carbs I was trying to decide how many Manny’s latkes our house would kill with the ham. But, alas, cold McDonald’s French fries made an appearance and made me think of that holiday staple, potatoes au gratin, but with French fries.
The great thing here is you don’t need to risk losing your fingertips slicing potatoes thin on a mandoline. You may not even have a mandoline. If you’re into Bluegrass, you might be like, isn’t that the instrument Bill Monroe played?
I also know you’re thinking, Mike, isn’t this like one of those clickbait things where you bake a pizza inside a taco and deep fry it like a doughnut, but it tastes like a terrible pizza taco doughnut and defies all science and physics? Well, yes, I want more paid subscribers so we can help more hospitality folks in need.
I’ve promised myself that even tho I will ignore all reason in pursuit of knowledge, I won’t publish anything that actual humans won’t find delicious. If you want recipes that sometimes are only good for your imaginary friends and stuffed animals, I suggest you subscribe to my friend Dennis’ newsletter. His standards are so substandard, it is deliciously breathtaking.
That all being said, it turns out French fry pie au gratin will have you talking to angels like that lady in The Black Crowes’ song. The top tastes like cheddar potato chips, and the gooey steamed potato custard will puff with garlic and spice below. In the words of M.F.K. Fisher, one of my favorite food writers, the wolf is at the door, but he ain’t getting in yet. And if he does, he’ll eat McDonald’s French fry au gratin instead of you. You’re welcome.
Ingredients
12” x 9” oval roaster or 10” square pan, or something that has an area of around 100 square inches.
If you forget, and I only remember how to calculate area (Length x Width) because my son is studying for a standardized test that in theory, if he fails, it feels like he will become a drug dealer like the ones he whacks in video games. In reality, because of the way life really works, he will likely be more successful than anyone I know
2 Large McDonald’s French fries, plus a small fry or whatever you find left at the bottom of the bag that fell out during the contact-free delivery process
2 cloves of garlic, peeled
½ small red onion or 1 shallot diced fine
3 sprigs of thyme
¼ teaspoon fresh grated nutmeg (or whatever’s been sitting in your pantry since 1999)
1 teaspoon salt
2 cups heavy whipping cream, 1 cup whole milk (you have 2%, I know, so did I, it’s fine)
2 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon flour
More butter for lubing pan above
2 oz Parm Reggiano
1 oz gruyere
2 oz aged sharp cheddar (salty and crumblier the better)
1 teaspoon peppercorns
A handful of chives, ribbon cut
Method
1) Mix cream and milk, microwave until warm, about 1 minute 30 seconds
2) Make a roux with 1 tbsp butter and flour, basically melt butter ‘til foamy over medium heat in a saucepan, whisk in flour and keep whisking for a minute or so until you have a beige paste.
3) Pour warm cream and milk into roux, whisk until smooth
4) Bring to a minor boil/simmer,
5) Throw in onion/shallot, nutmeg, peppercorns, garlic (smash garlic with side of knife before throwing in) and thyme, plus 1 oz cheddar, stir.
6) Take off heat, let everything steep for 30 minutes
(Now is a good time to put on a face mask and walk your dog around the block for the 47th time this week)
7) Lube the roaster or pan with butter on bottom and sides
8) Preheat oven to 300F
9) Split McDonald’s fries in two equal piles and split all remaining cheese in to two equal portions
10) Take pile 1 of fries and lay it out on the bottom of the pan. Put pile 1 of cheese on top of fries distributed equally across the top
11) Add pile 2 of fries on top of that (do not put pile 2 of cheese on yet)
12) Press down on all of this to compress the layers. You could use like a wine bottle and smash it down with a measure of quarantine frustration, or if you’re lazy like me, and convinced you don’t have COVID-19 yet, your hands
13) Pour cream mixture through a strainer on top of fries. Crush the remaining stuff in the strainer to get out as much flavor and then discard
14) Put the pan in oven. Cook for like 30-40 mins. Because the fries are already cooked, you’re basically trying to get the top brown and the cream infused. You’ll know it’s ready when the top layer starts getting crispy and golden brown
15) At this point, melt a tablespoon of butter in your microwave. Likely 10 seconds, but only you know your microwave and when that butter is going to explode like an atom bomb, so maybe 7 seconds. If it explodes, wipe down the microwave or you will end up divorced or in a major break-up. I warned you.
16) Drizzle butter over top of the potatoes, then distribute the second pile of reserved cheese over the top.
17) Crank your broiler. Put the whole pan back under broiler and watch until the top is caramelized like a Jersey shore cast member’s spray tan. Watch it or it will burn like the people who look at the Ark of Covenant in Indiana Jones.
18) Pull pan out, let everything sit for 20 minutes
19) At this point you can sprinkle the chives, serve family-style, and win Pandemic Easter
20) Or if you are stealing this for your blog, pull out a ring mold and cut a round core out and plate the potatoes Charlie Trotter cookbook 1994-style so everyone can see the archeologic dig of layers that is this treasure. Top with a sprinkle of chives.
