French Fry Diary 182: "America's Best"

"America's Best" is a recent mini-series on the Food Network. In the "Comfort Food" episode, Alton Brown and the Food Network database came up with a countdown of the best destinations for comfort foods, and one of those comfort foods is, of course, French fries.

Before we hit the favorite fried food though, they also talked about the best mashed potatoes. They went to L'Atelier inside the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. These high class mashers include French butter, lots and lots of it, perhaps as much butter as there is potato. And the potato used is fingerling, by the way. These are also perhaps the smoothest mashed potatoes as the fingerlings are smashed through a mesh net strainer, so zero lumps get through. Wow.

For the best French fries location, they chose the Boise Fry Co. in, where else, Boise Idaho. This is both a cop out and a bonanza, because rather than choose one fry they chose a place that serves dozens of kinds of fries. Dozens of different potatoes in dozens of different styles, with various seasonings and sauces.

They did spotlight their fries cooked in duck fat as having an out of this world taste. I have yet to try duck fat fries, let alone these, but I look forward to it. Apparently in the foodie world, duck fat fries are the gold standard for fries. The chef's specialty at the Boise Fry Company is the Bourgeois - the basket of fries cooked in duck fat, sprinkled with black truffle salt.