WhyNot you sound like a comercial for Crisco and there deepfried chicken in the seventies. They measured the oil, fried the chicken and measured the oil again. Then they topped it off level to prove it used only so much oil to deep fry.
And yet still people think of deep fried food as high fat*! Ignorance is a tough mo-fo to kill off, I’m telling ya!
*Of course BADLY deep-fried food is high fat, no argument there.
Please re-read my tiny post #11. It was taken from Cook’s Illustrated, the printed version of “America’s Test Kitchen.”
When the french fries came out soggy they tried an old trick…bread the potato with corn starch. That didn’t work for the reason WhyNot pointed out.
BUT…the next batch came out crispy. The oil now contained the corn starch from the previous (bad) batch.
Ah-Ha! So try putting the corn starch (not much, maybe 2 or 3 Tbs.) into the oil.
Bad idea. The first couple of fries will do the same thing and not leave the oil dirty.
Cornstarch in fryer = bad
Now we have to pose the question. Why?
Does it absorb the minute amount of water in the oil?
But the oil is hotter than 212F, it doesn’t have trace amounts of water in it. Ever get a drop of water into hot oil? It explodes and splatters oil everwhere. So whatever cornstarch or other particulates do, it isn’t to absorb water.
It’s bad because it’s not needed*, it also can burn and, as noted upthread, mix with the moisture and become pasty.
So I wonder, who coats their fries with cornstarch? Why?
*It’s like how some pizza houses cover the bottom of the crust with cornmeal, it’s not needed but they’ve been doing it for years and they ain’t gonna change, dammit! But, that’s another rant.
They do that because it helps the pizza dough slide off of the peel (the giant wooden doohickey they use to put the pizza in the oven). FWIW, they don’t put the cornmeal on the pizza, it goes on the peel; inevitably, some sticks to the dough.
I know* most people that use the corn meal never learned how to work the peel to keep the dough from sticking.
*11 years of italian cooking, from pizza shops in Kent, Ohio to bistros in Beverly Hills.
I call this cocktail sauce
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I have enough diagonal two inch burn scars on the underside of my forearms to attest to the fact that I never learned to work the peel well, but damned if I didn’t try . . . never lost a pizza, just scared a bunch of customers.
I agree, and not just from some foodie purist philosophical stance. Anything, especially small particulates, that doesn’t need to be in the oil is only going to increase contamination and provide food for bacteria to feed on, turning your lovely filtered oil into a cesspool of death and decay. Corn starch, in particular, is particularly particulate, in a very teeny-tiny, hard to strain out way.* I’ll use it under batter to make the batter stick to fish or chicken better, but I’m skeptical of throwing it into the oil directly or powdering food with it and then not covering it with anything. OTOH, I really respect the folks at Cook’s Illustrated, so I’m a little torn here. It may be a useful technique for the meal at hand, but it’s likely to contaminate your oil against later use.
*Unless, of course, you’re (general “you”, not anyone specific in this thread) throwing out your oil after every fry, in which case I rather despair of teaching you good cooking anyway. 
I made some tonight, since this thread made me crave some.
I sliced the potatoes into thin rounds, as thin as I could get them. For the first fry I put them in at about 350 degrees, because all the water in the potatoes makes the temperature drop fast. I took them out when they started to bubble up a little. Then I cooled them and gave them a second fry at about 385 until they were golden brown and delicious.
I dusted them with just a touch of Cajun seasoning, and served them with WhyNot’s suggestion of rosemary-sour cream dip. They were fantastic!
The best I’ve ever had come from the Atomic Cafe, a Caribbean-inspired restaurant in Lexington. That’s where I got the idea for the Cajun seasoning; they serve theirs with salsa. They’re great on their own, but the salsa really works well with them–it’s not spicy or bold enough to overpower them.
Soaking the fries in salty water for 30 min. or so and then draining them makes for crispier fries. The salt water pulls out much of the moisture from the potato.
I tried to do that many times, and the fries never cooked to my satisafation until I double fried them.
Which explains McDonalds. <lol>
Not that we put corn starch in our deep fryer, but as for teeny, tiny hard-to-strain-out stuff, we deal with it by putting a paper coffee filter in our wire strainer, putting the strainer over a large clean bowl, and the coffee filter will strain out even the teeny tiny stuff. We don’t do this every time, but fairly often.