Potato chips and emulsified octopus oil go together
This is not news, but I am spreading the word.
Potato chips don’t do much for me; I mainly think of them as a textural element for cheese sandwiches, a thing I have to acquire for my family when I tell them I’m going to the store and foolishly ask ask if they want anything, and a grease-producing agent that leaves me wondering if I should get up off the couch or just surreptitiously wipe my hands on my pants after I inevitably shove fistfuls down my gullet after I’ve acquired them for my family. This isn’t a principled stance; I’m just not enthusiastic about them (unless they’re legitimately horrifying ones made for the British market, in which case nothing can stop me from greedily devouring Marmite crisps or whatever while menacing my wife with the open end of the bag and claiming what’s in there is good).
The advice that writers of blog posts about how to enjoy tinned seafood often give to the effect that you should serve it alongside potato chips has consequently never done much for me; I’m aware that in Spain and Portugal and even here in Philadelphia, bars and living rooms where conservas are taken seriously see high-end items served alongside chips, but I’ve always met this with a shrug and sour thoughts about how I’ve seen bars I really like in Chicago and New York overrun by crazes for frozen tater tots and Hot Pockets. Recently, though, I was forced to reconsider when I saw this tweet from Dan Waber, proprietor of Rainbow Tomatoes Garden, often touted here as as the best place to get canned seafood:
“That looks incredibly good, and I have tins of seafood,” I thought. “Also, I have one of those milk-frothing gadgets—well, I don’t, but my son does because I bought him one … but surely I could use it and then thoroughly clean it, and he would be none the wiser … he only has it because I bought it for him … I have to clean up after his messes all the time anyway, this is no different than any other time I clean some soiled item and then put it back ready to use …”
I thought along these lines for several days, going back and forth between wanting emulsified tinned-seafood oil and being worried that if I explained to my son that I wanted to put him in a position to have possibly mussel-tainted milk in his coffee, he might deny me access to the gadget. Last night—seized, after having eaten multiple plates of meat and starch at an Amish-country smorgasbord for lunch, with a simply overwhelming desire to have a light, salty snack for dinner after my son came back with his mother from a grocery-shopping excursion that yielded potato chips and a nice bottle of chardonnay—I grabbed a tin of Matiz octopus in olive oil (a classic, not that expensive and widely-available brand carried at Whole Foods), poured the oil into a cup, emulsified it using my son’s milk frother, thoroughly cleaned the frother using soap and boiling water, then poured the oil over the octopus parts and dumped a fistful of the chips alongside it, as seen in the image atop here.
(My son, I will note, is fine with the since-revealed unauthorized use of his gadget, since it was cleansed. Had he not been I would have bought him a new one.)
Potato chips are now doing something for me; scooping up octopus parts soaked in whipped octopus-steeped oil are actually a perfect use case for them, I’d say, between the saltiness, the textural contrast between the crisp chips and the chewy octopus, the way the chips can be used as utensils, and the way the chips are slightly softened without losing their snap by being soaked in the bright liquid. I would absolutely order this in a bar or serve it to someone I wanted to impress at my house; it turns out, as is not unusual, that the conventional wisdom is correct and that chips and tinned seafood go together. I’m now just thinking about all the potential uses for frother-beaten tinned-seafood oil—it gets very creamy and feels very fancy to be enjoying, an ideal use for something that might be treated as garbage to be tossed out.
Housekeeping
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