Oven Chips- um, what?!

Listening to major fire safety developments in UK, these things were cited on BBC. I just, what? Not only do I not know the term "oven chips," I don't even understand really the concept? I guess I sorta knew oven baked French fries exist but as a component of like some retro 60s frozen tv thing? Now I'm hearing they're like an actual thing in U.K., and are much safer than what Britishes were doing stove top previously. Why are they not a big thing here, is it cause we just do drive thru to fast food? Brb going to buy some of these.

when we first had these in the late 70s/early 80s they were pretty rank and cardboard-tasting and I wouldn't touch them given the choice but obviously our frozen potato technology has advanced a lot because they're as good as frying your own now and a lot easier. big fat UK-style chips work better than French fries I think, the former are crispy outside, fluffy in the middle, but it seems harder to get a consistent cook of thin fries and they're easier to overdo anyway

Oven Chips prevent so many drunken chip-pan fires in the UK, they are a major H+S triumph.

tbh they must have a degree of flammability if you leave them in overnight

lol!

I've definitely left a pizza in the oven after returning from the pub, it didn't make for much of a breakfast but nobody died

love removing a forgotten tray of charred husks from an aga

Are they related to name if that 00s band?

which band is that?

TV safety bulletins (? I can't think what the name for these is?) did a good job on me as a kid because I'd be absolutely terrified to try and cook chips in a pan, chip pan fires second only to global nuclear destruction. 3rd would be trying to pick up a sparkler on bonfire night.

A house opposite the turning for my primary school had a chip pan fire and the burnt-out windows might have something to do with this fear since I can still remember the house now 30 years later.

I lived on Tesco Value oven chips as a student, they were fucking awful tbh, these modern ones are a wonder to behold by comparison.

Oven chip? (Hot)

Obv part of my surprise is not knowing of oven chips, but just as much is not having heard of the other chips. What are those called? Pan chips?

we'd just call them "chips"

if I was trying to distinguish them from the oven ones I might use "proper chips" I guess

I think part of my problem is that I've never seen anybody pan fry much. Sometimes when my actual hillbilly grandma from Kentucky would come I was really little, she would make fried chicken and that was panfried so now I'm starting to see my error.

The concept of pan frying chips is just not really in my brain space. I assumed they were deep fried, basket style, like American french fries.

they are, hence the fires. when I was a kid that was the only way my dad or mom would make chips

I wonder if there has ever been a posh type of a drunken pan fire, whilst sauteing potatoes (with paprika, sea salt + rosemary)!

Your dad made chips? Mine never went near a cooker in his life.

certain meals - chips, Sunday dinner - would usually be my dad iirc

TV safety bulletins (? I can't think what the name for these is?) did a good job on me as a kid because I'd be absolutely terrified to try and cook chips in a pan, chip pan fires second only to global nuclear destruction. 3rd would be trying to pick up a sparkler on bonfire night.

lol otm

http://lakelandcamel.scene7.com/is/image/LakelandCamel/18683_1

standard British chip pan, for reference

We had a deep fat frier, I did the second worst thing ..

I put it on the oven top, and instead of switching the frier on, I turned the ring on instead.

Result: One fat frier with melted feet, and one hob-ring now unuseable.

More recently, I bought some frozen chips home, but then found they were not oven chips. Oh noe. So, I put them on a tray anyway, sprayed liberally with that lo-fat Olive oil, cook for 50 mins total, check them and turn them, and reapply spray, they were luvly.

conversely when he got older and couldn't be bothered peeling potatoes any more my dad would buy oven chips and deep fry them anyway

I love chopping up sweet potatoes and oven cooking them in olive oil and seasoning - absolutely delish and cheaper than oven chips.

Yeah, we do those regularly - you can even get oven sweet potatoes/chips now.

I wonder if there has ever been a posh type of a drunken pan fire, whilst sauteing potatoes

Cravat catching alight while flambeing a crepe suzette

I don't remember seeing anyone use a basket to fry chips, just straight in a high-top pan, bit like a soup pan. Assume they'd have to dump the contents into a sieve or something?

I wonder if there has ever been a posh type of a drunken pan fire, whilst sauteing potatoes (with paprika, sea salt + rosemary)!

i think it'd take ages for sauteeing potatoes to catch fire but i guess if you fell asleep. i'm guessing not many people sautee drunk since alcohol makes even the most wanky of us want to eat relatively quickly.

i am fairly sure there used to be "don't drink and fry" ads on ulster television.

With all that extra money flowing into the economy now maybe simple oven chips won't be cutting it anymore in Ulster, at least not if they aren't drizzled in some expensive truffle oil and w/ grated Parmesan :p

I wonder if any lottery winner has ever installed a full sized commercial countertop fryer in their kitchen to get proper chipshop style chips at home, got pissed one night and fancied some chips...

Oh awesome. Another thread where English people are weird about food.

JK

It made me laugh though because ime oven fries are the only kind I've ever seen anyone in the US make at home. I know you can get a deep fryer for the house but I've never seen one before.

Wait a second. The OP is American? This is even weirder now!

You've seriously never seen Ore Ida (or whatever) fries?

https://www.mccain.ie/custom/uploads/2015/10/49305-Micro-Chips-SC-4pack-R-ROI-HR_500px-1.png

Well, I think we can all agree those are just wrong.

i actually scanned to see if there's any record of chip-pan style cooking tools being illegal in USA. understandably, the term "chip-pan" is not used, not sure what you'd call that. i mean, it's a chip-pan hellscape in UK from what i can see in google, yet that is not "a thing" here, and i've not seen a pan with a lil basket like that really.

from what i can tell, my people put away chip pans, bought handguns when they got here, and decided that would drunk entertainment.

"be drunk entertainment"

you'd use a deep fat fryer. presumably there was some kind of pan equivalent before fryers, altho i'm just guessing.

you'll get my chip-pan when you pry it from my hot, incinerated fingers.

they actually taught us at school how to not burn your house down using a chip pan. i bet kids today don't learn essential life skills like that any more.

I'm an American and I've fried chips/fries in a stockpot (and drained into a colander because I didn't have a basket) but I hadn't heard of chip pans until now. I wasn't aware that homemade chips were such a big thing in the UK (I figured ppl usually just bought them at chip shops) nor that every mid-sized UK town has a monument to its chip fire dead. to me oven fries still signify bad public school cafeteria food, and I'm skeptical of these recent cryofreezing breakthroughs that have apparently rendered these things edible over the past 10 years.

But you knew they existed!

You've seriously never seen Ore Ida (or whatever) fries? like i know about tater-tots do those count? it's like i always suspected then, it's not that britishes are weird, it's that my parents sucked. deprived of oven-chips. on the plus, our place dint burn down, so there's that.

thanks for the education all! glad safer food prep is happening all around, for real.

Tots def count. Also, I wouldn't say you were deprived. Like unreg said, they were pretty gross until recent years.

But you knew they existed!

lol, I'm pretty sure I learned about them by googling something like "can you fry french fries without a deep fryer", which is how I've acquired most of my culinary knowledge over the years

(unrelated, but I was in my early 20s when I first realized that there was such a thing as stovetop popcorn. until then I'd assumed the only options were air-popping and microwaving)

you never heard about the midlands burning down because of popcorn?

I think at one point a few years ago it looked like exploding vape-charger fires had become the new "chip-pan fires" of the UK, but maybe that was a bad batch chargers.

Home fries in the states, right?

nah, home fries are more like chunks of potato

I know someone whose freezer doesn't have oven chips in <:-O

surely all freezers contain peas, chips, fishfingers and a piece of grey unidentifiable meat in a plastic freezer bag?

That's all we did tbh

Another of the great cultural divides then

pan-fried though

isn't 50% of We Want Plates about chips served in miniature fryers

we never had a chip pan when I was a kid (deep fat fryer cos we were posh) and yet I daren't even risk making falafel these days due to the fear of hot oil instilled in me by those '80s safety ads

I'm absolutely terrified of deep fat frying due to same and have literally never deep fried anything

We had a chip pan with a basket when I was a kid. Mind you, it was none of this fancy oil stuff, it was good old dripping. I used to be fascinated by the exact point it had started to melt enough the basket could get lifted out, and by the last bit to melt (which always ended up in the centre of the basket) and how long I could keep it solid by lifting it out periodically. Fun for all pre-schoolers, hot fats.

These Fry Daddy things were fairly popular in the US growing up in the 70s/80s. Everyone that has used one has probably a couple scars on their hands or knuckles from them. I think the Arrested Development 'Corn Baller' from Mexico jokes are kinda remembering these things.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/a9/3e/d5/a93ed52ea3794caea0b0d84e64f75ddf.jpg

We had one but we didn't use it much. It was a witch to clean. We would have fried potatoes/hash browns made in an iron skillet.

when I moved into my first ever flat I inherited some revolting old plug in chip fryer the previous (probably incarcerated or dead) tenant left behind. I am ashamed to say I actually used the fucking thing a few times. The stench of it still haunts me to this day.

fear of hot oil instilled in me by those '80s safety ads

yep, same here. also, what happens to all that oil once it's been used?

You reuse it a few times but then yeah, you really shouldnt toss it down the drain. Tho I suspect a lot of people did?

Aussie insurance ad from the 80s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ2xalBSGXI

Those are the stuffiest sounding aussies ever?

Not everyone speaks like Paul Hogan :)

But yeah the joke when I was a kid was that, heck if your kitchen was on fire you'd hardly go "oh my goodness, the chips!" rather than "OH FUCK MY FUCKING KITCHEN IS ON FUCKING FIRE"

That's what I meant, wasn't talking about enunciation.

(Obv I was)

Alarmist PSAs about deep fryers seems

Oops

Dropped my phone in a vat of grease.

...seems very niche or like they were made in response to a highly publicized incident, not necessarily b/c there was an epidemic of chip fryer fires. Or was there?

how come nobody ever blows up their kitchen frying latkes?

we used to make really good latkes in the oven, using a muffin pan

I need to dig that recipe out again and post it somewhere

oil down the drain = FATBERGS

they weren't alarmist ads for deep fat fryers

They were for chip pans, which is just a pot with a fryer basket

yeah one of the USPs of deep fat fryers was you weren't supposed to be able to burn your house down with them

Would love one of those teaspoon of oil fryers but they seem inordinately expensive.
Not really heard what the chips etc produced are like.

Also surprised that somebody would buy oven chips then fry them. I thought supermarkets sold precut chips without whatever processing made them oven chips.

My parents used to own a Zyliss potato chipper (a fantastic piece of early 70s industrial design) and a chip pan (a grease encrusted lump of metal - IIRC it was dark blue and the bakelite knob on the lid doubled as an adjustable vent). The chipper came with two cutters: wide and narrow. My parents never used the narrow one.

Our kitchens in university accommodation were sparsely equipped, but they did provide electric, thermostat-controlled deep-fat fryers, presumably to discourage students from drunkenly using a chip pan on the stove.

They are good for putting fish fingers in. Are fish fingers even a thing in the States?

Ah, OK, you call them fish sticks. I can't really argue with that.

Or if you're a "South Park" fan, "fish dicks."