I tried it twice while in Berlin and came to the same conclusion. Granted, once was from train car food service and the other was from the landmark rotating restaurant on the Fernsehturm Berlin, perhaps not the finest examples. But cut up hot dog in mildly curried ketchup sums it up.
I really, really regret not getting doner kebab.
Oh, yes. Berlin-style doners are divine!
I remember thinking: well, this isn’t much different from a sausage you’d buy down the chip shop in the UK, and that is really what the novelty is, because normal german sausages are much more heavy on the spices and garlic. But the name currywurst really is misleading and doesn’t taste of much apart from a normal sausage in the UK.
I lived on them in Germany, indeed the UK now has a chain of shops called “German donner kebab”, which I don’t think of as very good (if you need to get fries with it, it isn’t the size of a german donner kebab).
It appears there is now one in Brooklyn, US with 5 others to open in the US.
In my London suburb we have four takeaways that do chips and three of them do the crappy French Fries style fast-food chips. The fourth, gloriously, sold thick fish and chip-style potatoey chips that result in a nice full tummy of fluffy satisfaction. They were not particularly special thick chips but they were still something to look forward to during a drunken tube ride home. Until one day I went in and they’d reverted to the pointless thin fries that their competitors also sold.
I nearly burned the place down.
Sounds like you had one which did chips, rather than the much less effort, fries, and now you have none. There is so much more equipment needed for a real fish and chip shop which is a lot of effort to maintain and take up so much space, that your standard kebab and pizza place usually bin them for a pizza oven.
Real chips are cooked from fresh. What is called fries are not within the remit of the conversation about chips changing region to region, those are exactly the same everywhere and I think are part cooked and taken from the freezer in portions per person into a small fryer. Even for a long time places like MacDonalds, which introduced those abominations, didn’t even use potato, I believe, some sort of corn/maize formations.
Urgh.
There should be some sort of agreement or law that says real thick chips are allowed to be called Super Special Magnificent Real Chips and the other thin pointless things should be called Fries. By law they cannot be called chips.
That and there should be a difference in name between Apple Pie and apple pie with raisins. They should call that Not Apple Pie or something so the rest of us can be protected.
Malt and salt, certainly. Maybe a bit of tartar sauce if it isn’t too strong - made some myself once, with homemade mayo, and it was delicious. Curry sauce tends to divide people (I’ve tried, can’t get on with it), and whilst my mother adores mushy peas, I can’t stand them (they are crushed, tinned marrofat peas, with a bit of vinegar thrown in). I’m happy to have a bit of ketchup on the side for chip dipping.
I don’t mind my chips getting soggy, and still miss the days when a fish and chip takeway would involve wrapping them in newspaper. The food would steam in the wrapping and make the chips soggy. Loved it. Now all chip shops seam to package their takeaways in cardboard boxes. It’s just not the same.
My favorite fried potato configuration is curly fries followed by steak-fry-esque “real” chips. Both of them because they are excellent ketchup delivery mechanisms for different reasons, the chips due to their large stable area, the fries because the fries interlock more than non-curly ones and so can deliver more ketchup when interlocking due to the viscosity of the ketchup. (Wedge style chips have less area per gram, and the ketchup falls off straight fries.)
It’s not gourmet sashimi. The outside tastes of nothing except batter and is immensely improved with ketchup. The inside tastes slightly better without ketchup, but it is the rare bite that is hardly anything but fish rather than tasting mostly of batter, and even on bites that are a lot of both, it goes down better with lubrication for the batter.
I am not aware of that ever being the case in the US. They’re made from whole potatoes that are peeled and jetted through a potato cutter (similar to the hand-operated ones they use here in some fast food stands. It’s just a metal grid that the whole potatoes are pushed through and cut into shape.)
It might have been a myth or perhaps BK. It was from about 20 years ago. Someone was supposed to have used corn/maize for their fries.
I’m skeptical that was ever the case. Potatoes are cheap enough and the processing so mechanized, even twenty years ago, that I can’t imagine you’d save any money by making Frankenstein french fries from corn.
Maybe corn oil?
I think Burger King fries were (are?) battered at some point so there may have been non-potato ingredients.
Salt and vinegar, of course. Anything else is just Un-British (and you can’t get much more British than fish & chips). Mind you, there are weird people in the west of Scotland who apparently use a kind of brown sauce, ugh. Ketchup is some sort of strange American thing. My American wife likes it so we keep it in stock… the things one does to preserve harmony in a marriage…!
The BK fries have some kind of spray on them. They did that sometime in the 90s, IIRC, to compete with the far superior McDonald’s fries. I do not know if it’s currently the case.
Ah, here’s an AP article from 1997 where BK unveiled their new fries
The only Fish & Chips I ever had were from a God-awful place called, “Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips”, and it was one of the most ghastly foods ever to have the misfortune of entering my mouth. I threw it in the garbage before I was half done. To answer the question, however, I did liberally sprinkle hot sauce on it in an effort, truth be told, to cover up the food rather than to enhance it.
Salt 'n sauce! I loved that when I was there. It’s brown sauce (which is already pretty vinegary) mixed with malt vinegar. Quite the tongue-tanger. I thought it was a peculiar Edinburgh thing.
I just googled it - long demised by the looks of things, but the fish was in triangles. Some awful sort of reconstituted triangles. No wonder it was attrocious.
It should be fresh cod/haddock, hand-dipped in beer batter!
Many fast-food places coat the fries in sugar before frying them, which both makes them sweeter (which, of course, a lot of folks like) and gives them an appealing golden-brown caramelized color when fried. And I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if, at many places, that sugar coating is high-fructose corn syrup, or some other corn product, because it’s so cheap. But the body of the fry is still always going to be actual potato. It’s probably actual potato that’s sliced at the factory, partially-cooked, coated with the sugar and other ingredients, and then frozen before being shipped across the country, but it’s still potato.
Some places serve breaded French fries, which would mean yet more non-potato stuff coating the potato. But I think that’s usually more wheat than corn.
According to the article, it’s still a potato fry, “The new fries are made with a process in which fresh-cut potatoes are sprayed with a potato-based coating before they are frozen and shipped to Burger King restaurants where they are cooked, as before, in vegetable oil.”