Inside Three Of The World’s Most Famous Chef Dishes

You don’t become the world’s most famous mashed potatoes by accident. Nor the world’s best chips, for that matter. Behind these iconic chef dishes lies an obsessive pursuit of perfection that borders on the pathological.

There is no shortage of dishes that have become well-known simply because the people who invented them are. But out of the deluge, there are some genuine gems that have endured in large part due to the sheer brilliance of the dish itself. These are dishes that have redefined the way the culinary world thinks about food, inspiring conversation, cult followings, and copycats that will endure long after the television appearances and Michelin stars have all faded into the background.

The interesting thing about the three that we’ll be highlighting here today is that none of them rely on any particularly exotic ingredients. They’re centred around potatoes, beef, and chips, things that you’ve eaten countless times before and whose ubiquity hardly warrants a second thought. What sets them apart instead is the amount of thought and, in some cases, borderline unhealthy obsession that went into elevating them to the highest echelons of gastronomy.

Joël Robuchon’s Pommes Purée

Of all the dishes that you’d expect to inspire reverence in the culinary world, mashed potatoes wouldn’t exactly be one of them. And yet, Joël Robuchon’s pommes purée has done that and more. One of the most copied side dishes in all of fine dining, it’s comprised of an ingredients list that is stark in its simplicity: potatoes, butter, milk, and salt.

The real secret, if you can call it that, is an almost comical disregard for moderation. You see, Robuchon’s recipe uses a lot of butter. How much butter, you ask? Try two parts waxy Ratte potatoes for every one part of butter. Yes, you read that right: the recipe really does call for half the weight of potatoes in butter.

Then comes the work. The potatoes are mashed while still hot before cold butter is incorporated little by little, beaten vigorously by hand until the whole thing resembles not so much a bowl of mashed potatoes as a warm butter emulsion. Finally, it’s passed repeatedly through a fine tamis until every microscopic lump has been hunted down and eliminated.

The result somehow tastes intensely of potato while also being outrageously rich, as you’d expect with the addition of that much butter, and silky to the point that it behaves on your plate in a way you’d never have imagined mashed potatoes could.

Gordon Ramsay’s Beef Wellington

Can’t have an article on iconic celebrity chef dishes without mentioning Gordon Ramsay’s Beef Wellington, can you? Beef Wellington is a finicky dish that seems to constantly teeter on the edge of disaster. And that’s because it just leaves so much room for error. If you overcook the beef, it’ll end up dry. If you undercook the pastry, it’ll end up pale. If you let too much moisture escape, you’ll fall victim to the dreaded soggy bottom.

And this is precisely why Gordon Ramsay’s version has become as influential as it has. Rather than simply wrapping beef in pastry and hoping for the best, every layer exists to solve a specific problem. The mushroom duxelles is cooked until virtually every last drop of moisture has evaporated, while the Parma ham provides another protective barrier while contributing salt and fat. Then, in one of the cleverest touches, paper-thin chive crêpes wrap around the filling, working to soak up any remaining juices before they can ever reach the pastry.

What arrives at the table is a succession of textures that somehow all remain perfectly intact, with the crisp pastry giving way to savoury mushrooms, salty ham, sharp mustard, and a centre of beef that retains a beautiful shade of pink.

Heston Blumenthal’s Triple-Cooked Chips

If Robuchon perfected mashed potatoes, then Heston Blumenthal is the undisputed king of the chips. Most of us would be perfectly happy to throw strips of potatoes into hot oil and call it a day. Not Heston Blumenthal. He decided that this wasn’t nearly complicated enough because of course he did.

His method begins by simmering thick-cut potatoes until tiny cracks begin forming across the surface. They’re then left to dry before being fried once at a relatively low temperature, frozen, and finally fried again at a much higher heat.

Every stage in the process has a purpose. Boiling gelatinises the starches, while drying removes the moisture. The first fry helps to build the structure, while the second transforms that dried exterior into a shell that harbours an astonishing crispness.

What you end up with is a chip with an audible crunch that gives way to an interior so fluffy that it borders on mashed potato. If that whole procedure sounds absurdly elaborate for a plate of chips, that’s because it is. But it also happens to produce some of the finest chips you’ll ever eat.

When you look at all these dishes together, a pattern starts to emerge. These signature dishes aren’t built around some secret ingredients hidden away from the rest of us. Rather, they’re more or less familiar comfort foods that have been pushed to their absolute limits by people for whom the concept of “good enough” doesn’t quite exist. It just goes to show that sometimes greatness doesn’t necessitate reinventing the wheel. Sometimes it’s about spending considerably longer thinking about potatoes than any reasonable person ever should.

Opening image: Gordon Ramsay Bar & Grill KL | Facebook