Restaurants

Little Bitty Burger Barn

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The best sliders in Houston are probably the ones at Reef. Three go for eight bucks on the menu, but try them during weekday happy hour when they sell for a dollar apiece at the bar.

Reef chef Bryan Caswell once worked in the kitchen of Jean-Georges in New York, and he used to eat sliders at Sassy's late nights after the bars closed. He put them on his menu mainly as a way to use up ribeye steak trimmings, so the meat is top-notch. And he sized the burger to fit the restaurant's excellent house-baked dinner rolls. Like Little Bitty Burger Barn, Caswell tops his sliders with caramelized onions.
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Little Bitty Burger Barn's hand-cut fries are an enigma.

As Reef's Bryan Caswell told me, fries are not easy. He said that they hand-cut the french fries when he worked at Bank by Jean-Georges in the Hotel Icon. But he abandoned the practice when he opened Reef.

Hand-cut fries have to be cooked twice to taste any good, Caswell said. And they have to be cooled off in between the first and second cooking. Unless you have an expensive blast chiller, the logistics are a nightmare.

But if you aren't going to go to the trouble of doing them right, then you might as well serve frozen fries. Most of the American public considers McDonald's fries to be the gold standard, Caswell argues, and McDonald's uses frozen potatoes.

"So what makes hand-cut fries come out dark brown, greasy and limp?" I asked Caswell. He said maybe it had something to do with the potatoes, but he wasn't sure.

In the 2001 book How to Read a French Fry, Los Angeles Times food editor Russ Parsons wrote that over time, the oil in a fryer goes through five stages. "By examining a piece of fried food, you can tell a lot about the oil's age."

Brand new "break-in oil" yields white french fries with raw centers and none of the aromas we associate with fried foods. After a few batches, break-in oil becomes "fresh oil," which produces a bit of browning and a little crispness. Fresh oil in turn becomes "optimum oil," which makes crisp, golden-brown fries with rigid edges. As it begins to break down, "degrading oil" turns the fries brown and limp. And if you don't replace it quickly, degrading oil becomes "runaway oil," which yields extremely dark, greasy fries.

Parsons provides lots more details about the chemical processes that cause these changes. And he intriguingly notes that old-time fryer men add a tablespoon of old oil to the new stuff when they change their oil to get to the optimum stage quicker.

Is the problem with Little Bitty's fries in the potatoes or in the oil? I don't know, but I hope they get it worked out before I go back, because I'm craving those sliders. Maybe I'll just switch to potato chips.

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