Cooking w kot and drinks

Sup Veeky Forums, was gonna post this in the fml thread but it would take up quite a few posts so it gets its own thread. Tonight I decided to fry up some tater chips from scratch, as well as cook up a philly cheese steak sammich. Please be advised that I am not making authentic philly cheese steak because I don't eat cheese from a can, nor are my authentic tater chips actually authentic, so do not shit on me too much. I will probably skip a few steps, but know that I am making the chips based on this serious eats recipe:
seriouseats.com/recipes/2010/09/print/extra-crunchy-potato-chips.html

I am making the philly based on pretty much no recipe, taking a few liberties as well.

Let's rock.

Now, the first thing you wanna do is wash off your taters and get out the old knuckle slicing apparatus. Having a few drinks beforehand takes the edge off, but if you're an amateur you can always have your first drink of the night right now. I'm having my third Wild Turkey 101 on rocks.

Put the 3mm plate on the mandolin and have at it. Nothing bad has ever occured when using one of these while drinking, I'm sure.

Be sure to have a bowl of cold water at the ready for your tater slices. In fact, run cold water into the bowl. Running water and soaking the taters removes starch which is important to the overall tater chip in the end.

Skipped a few steps here:

-Bring 2 quarts of water to a boil with 2 tablespoons of distilled white vinegar.
-Dump in your tater slices and boil them for 3 minutes, then remove them and set on paper towels to dry.

Get out your deep fryer and preheat it to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm using peanut oil but if I were smarter I'd have used sunflower oil because that makes some amazing tater chips.

Toss your tater slices in the fryer. By that, I mean gently place them in the basket and lower it in carefully, because you should never throw shit into a deep fryer. The chips will be done when they stop bubbling, so roughly 10-15 minutes from now...

They get bubbly as heck. At this point I wish I could do the old fry guy trick we do in restaurants where you put another basket on top of the food to keep it fully submerged. I don't have another basket; instead, I'm just stirring this shit as often as I can.

Roughly 2 and a half minutes in, the slices are floating in the oil but we have a long way to go before they're done. Again, the old basket trick would be wonderful here. Instead I have to flip them all over manually with a spider so they'll cook somewhat evenly.

Long story short, cooked all of that shit up in 3 batches. Most of them were a bit overcooked because I relied on them being "done" when they stopped bubbling. I'm just gonna buy potato chips next time.

I've made the french fry recipe from serious eats about 100 times and it's very similar to this one; turns out fucking perfect every time for me.

On to the star of the show: The philly cheesesteak sammich.

I'm using half of a 12oz ribeye for the meat. The other ingredients include:
-Lil bit of white onion, sliced thin
-Melrose peppers, an heirloom pepper from Italy... I grow them in my backyard. They look like hot chilies but they have zero heat and taste like very sweet bell peppers. Fucking amazing, apparently popular in parts of Chicago.

More ingredients are to come, but that's for later. Some of these images may be out of sequence at this point.

Throw a knob of butter in a pan like you're a Brit. Everything in this philly is cooked in butter.

Onions go in first. This is low heat, and they're gonna take 30 minutes or so. I was still cooking the second batch of tater chips when I started this, so there was time to kill. At this point it's a good idea to put your steak into the freezer. 20-30 minutes in there will firm it up and make it easier to slice into thin strips.

When you run out of liquor during the cooking process, this is a good sign that you're on the right track. Refill with ice and alcohol and continue on your path. There's a lot of downtime when you're cooking so be sure to do the dishes as much as possible, or you're gonna hate yourself tomorrow.

Here's another shitty picture of some onions and butter, this time with part of a wooden spoon in frame.

Let's get back on track: I brought out like 2 teaspoons of demiglace and put it all in a bowl next to the julienned peppers. The demiglace looks surprisingly thin, but it's stickier than honey, I swear I spent 10 minutes cleaning shit up after all of this.

I also made another drink, because priorities. You don't see this on Food Network.

Throwing that steak in the pan with cooked down onions, also putting in the Melrose peppers. Added salt earlier to help the onions break down, won't need much more than that. I already seasoned the steak with salt and pepper prior.

Generic hoagie/sub roll for this. Honestly the bread isn't a big deal, it's just gonna soak up all dat joose and be delicious.

And yeah before you ask, I'm using real demiglace for this sandwich because I have that shit on deck for all occasions.

I'm thinking bout them b eefs.

Remove beef to plate, eat some of the tater chips and they're tasty. Take picture, drink whiskey, proceed.

By the way, tater chips were done a few minutes ago. Here's a picture of all of them, somewhat overcooked but still delicious.

Now it's time to deal with the juices in that pan. All that onion and pepper and beef juice needs something special.

So we're gonna deglaze the pan with mayonnaise. That's right, fucking mayonnaise.

you salt these puppies?

Also adding demiglace at this point, which is pretty much like adding molasses; it's hilariously sticky and thick despite all appearances. I did a good job keeping this last batch rather clean.

Yep I added salt for sure, don't know if I mentioned that. Like I said I forget steps sometimes.

At this point in cooking I also added a bit of 'creamy' horseradish to the pan sauce. Could've added white pepper or similar instead but this is better.

So at this point we have a pretty great pan sauce with plenty of flavor, but the one thing I haven't done so far is adding alcohol. I threw in a shot of Cognac because my Wild Turkey is for drinking, not cooking.

The sauce was quite tasty at this point, but a bit salty, and for a sandwich it was strange... well, only one choice at this point.

Assembly begins of the sammich. Did not toast the roll, this was on purpose so that the roll would absorb as much joose as possible.

Saucy as fuck.

Time for you to get mad, Veeky Forums. I put American 'cheese' on this motherfucker. That's right, this is a sandwich made with a pan sauce thickened with beef demiglace, and topped with fucking Wal-Mart American 'cheese' singles. Fight me.

Not sure if I missed a step, I can't find when I go back and reread, but, what was the mayonnaise for?

Finished product. A fucking masterwork of a philly cheesesteak and some (to be desu pretty amazing) homemade tater chips.

I could have cooked some mushrooms in butter, flambe'd them and thrown them in to make this even better, but I didn't have any on hand tonight. This was a test run for some ingredients and I am quite happy.

I'm going to plant 8 million of these Melrose peppers next year; they're like bell peppers turned up to 11 on the amp.

Also, next time I won't thicken the sauce with so much demiglace; probably won't even use any as it's not really needed here. This was so rich that I could only eat half of it. Lesson learned about moderation.

Normally I would mix mayo/horseradish together to make tiger sauce for a philly. Instead I decided to add mayo and horseradish to the pan along with demiglace and cognac, pretty much all at the same time, and deglaze the pan with said ingredients. Made it all into a sauce to spoon into the sandwich, although the horseradish was sadly completely lost to the richness of the demiglace...

I did promise you fellers that we were cooking with kot and I will not fail to deliver. I'm really getting attached to this little guy who lives out back behind my workplace. I call him Charlie after Charlie Day... fuck I'm gonna have to take him home.

You seem to deep fry often, ever deep fry Mars bars or any candy bars?

Going to sleep soon, I'm sure I didn't detail my cooking process properly at all so please if you have questions just post and I'll try to answer them when I wake up.

I actually haven't done any fried candy bars somehow. I do deep-fried key lime pies semi-regularly at work as a special. I don't deep fry stuff at home very often because it takes a while to set up and make sure everything is safe, plus it's mad unhealthy.

I love to throw shit in the fryers at work, though. I've made plenty of weird fried shit there.

I'm going to try it out tomorrow at a football game, I'll let you know how it goes. I'd only do it if I'm already frying something else in this case a turkey :)

Nice, I love tailgating more than the actual game most times. Fried turkey is fuckin amazing, might have to do that this Thanksgiving if I don't smoke one instead.