Potato play | 4Food | Channel4.com

Date Published:: 11/01/2008

I ruminate on the humble spud, and along the way prepare thickly chopped potatoes for roasting the Gordon Ramsay way. By Cookalong guinea pig Sam Jordison

Fun chopping

I found chopping the potatoes much easier than the herbs. Using a properly sharpened knife made the process a pleasure. Especially since, on Gordon's instructions, the damp tedium of peeling had been removed from the equation.

Spud bashing became a meditative process. There's a weird part of me that could happily cut potatoes for hours. The action was so smooth and easy that my mind happily drifted: I am at one with the potato. The potato is now in eight pieces. I take another potato, and so on.

Ten fingers and counting

I managed to remain grounded enough to avoid chopping off my fingers, but otherwise my mind drifted around a potato world. A curiously interesting place to be.

Gordon Ramsay's unpeeled, oven-baked, thickly chopped spud slices spoke volumes to me about our post-millennial condition. It wasn't so long ago that standard practice was to peel potatoes to within an inch of their existence, and boil, roast or fry them until every nutritious atom they contained had been thoroughly nuked.
All that seems very distant today.

Nu chips

So too do my recollections associated with potatoes from growing up in the North West of England. Back then, chip pans were a constant source of fascination and fear. As well as all the horror show imaginings they conjured of psychopathic strangers using them to catapult hot fat over my features, there was also the very real fire threat they posed to my neighbours. The region was subjected to dire daily warnings on the TV about the risks of chip pan conflagrations – and the near impossibility of putting them out. Even so, hundreds lost their homes every year. Some of them people I knew.

Now all that seems very distant. The North West remains a chip pan fire hotspot and deep fat friers still account for almost 20% of all household blazes around the UK, but the numbers have fallen rapidly since the mid 1990s. Chips are now entering a different cultural space. You're as likely to read about the thrice-cooked fries of Bray as hot fat infernos. All of which speaks volumes about the new cooking revolution in the UK and the influence of get-in-amongst-the-raw-ingredients chefs like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jamie Oliver and of course, Gordon Ramsay.