Food
Burger King's new King Fries are a curious product. "Tastier Hotter Crisper," they trumpet. That's as may be, but I am puzzled.
Mystery number one: King Fries call themselves the "nation's favourite fry", even though they've only been available a few weeks, and even though everyone knows McDonald's chips are indisputably the best (unless you prefer floury chip-shop chips, or unless you make your own frites from finest organic beef dripping, in which case you are a hopeless foodie who cannot claim to speak for the nation).
Mystery number two: the secret ingredient in the King Fry which makes it Tastier Hotter Crisper is a special potato coating. Curiouser and curiouser. In other words, the King Fry is a potato chip, whose unusual flavour comes from . . . potato. Am I missing something here?
Its potato casing gives the King Fry a creepy, quasi- cannibalistic quality. This is only reinforced by Mr Potato Head's image in the Burger King marketing campaign. It's a vegetable echo of the film Gorillas in the Mist, where real chimpanzees were forced to dress up in monkey costumes. The real thing becomes masked by a simulacrum of itself. Ugh! It's the stuff nightmares are made of. Sure enough, when I come to taste the mysterious fries, with their weird coating, there is something science fiction about them. Hot, yes. Crispy, yes. Tasty, in a salty, fake kind of way. But at what cost to the innocent potato, whose body has been snatched and replaced with a clone?
King Fries are part of a vogue among fast food manufacturers for reconstituting foods and flavouring them with themselves. At Marks & Spencer you can buy baked potato crisps in baked potato flavour. Whatever next? Yoghurt- flavoured yoghurt? Brown bread in wholemeal flavour? These gimmicks are largely a way of compensating for the flavour that such highly processed snacks lose in the factory. In selling baked potato-flavour crisps, Marks & Spencer is effectively admitting that its regular baked crisps don't taste of potato at all.
The trouble with these unholy clone-foods is that they make us forget that foodstuffs flavoured with themselves can be fresh and delicious. Squidgy chocolate brownies, for example, are much nicer with extra chocolate chips added. Lovely summer desserts can be made from raspberries sitting in a coulis of raspberries or strawberries in a strawberry puree. The sauce and the whole fruits intensify each other on the tongue, creating a fusion of pure berriness. And French chefs often poach chicken in a reduced chicken stock to bring out its essential chickeny quality.
As for this orange-orange flan, I defy you to eat anything more orangey, except, perhaps, for a whole, peeled raw orange. Use Sevilles, if you can.
Orange-orange flan
I've adapted this from a recipe of Stephen Ross, chef at the Olive Tree in Bath. Make a pastry from 150g flour, 100g butter, three tbsp icing sugar, an egg and the zest of an orange. Line a deep, nine-inch flan tin, chill and then bake blind using greaseproof paper and beans. For the filling, you need 600ml fresh orange juice, the crushed seeds of nine cardamon pods, six eggs, 270g caster sugar, the juice and zest of two to three oranges, and 180ml double cream (lightly whipped). Preheat oven to 130 C. Boil the orange juice with the cardamon until reduced by half. Meanwhile, whisk the eggs and sugar until very thick and creamy. Strain in the reduced cardamomy juice along with the zest and juice of the other oranges. Fold in the cream. Pour into the pastry case and bake for one and a half hours or until set.
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