About
About this, and me
I’m Ruth. I grew up in Stockport on chip-shop chips with vinegar, moved to Ghent in 2015 for a job that lasted two years, and stayed for reasons that are mostly called Bart.
Bart’s father, Rik, has been frying potatoes in the shed behind his house since before Bart was born. He taught me the double fry my first winter here, mostly by standing behind me and sighing whenever I did something wrong. It took a while.
This is in English because my family is, and because my Dutch is good enough for the hatch and for arguing with Rik but not for writing all of this down without help. When I use a Flemish word I try to say what it means. When I get one wrong, Bart tells me, usually in front of people.
I am not a chef and I have no training. Everything here is what works in our kitchen on our fryer. Where the honest answer is “it depends”, I’ve given a range instead of pretending.
The small print
No adverts, no accounts, no tracking, no cookies. There is a little JavaScript for the timer, the portion helper and the sauce filter; it runs in your browser and keeps nothing.
The frietkoten on the shacks page are unnamed on purpose. If you think you recognise one, you probably do, and I’d rather you kept it to yourself.
The drawings are mine. I started drawing them because every photo I took of a cone of fries looked like evidence.
Next to the fryer
- A 3-litre fryer with a dial that lies
- A probe thermometer that doesn’t
- Two baking trays for resting, and the lid of a plastic box
- A cheap wall-mounted cutter, a smaller copy of Rik’s
- A big steel bowl for salting
- Masking tape and a pen, for counting fat sessions
- Paper cones from the cash-and-carry, because it tastes better from a cone. It does.
- A fire blanket, never used. I’d like to keep it that way.