Gersh Kuntzman Has Blood On His Hands

Gersh Kuntzman goes out on the handle of a grimy deep fryer to confirm your worst fears — Crisco really does taste better:

[Brooklyn chef Alan] Harding fired up the deep fryer and I melted some Crisco in a pan. When both were ready, we dropped the potato slices into the hot oil — and were stunned to find that the potato chips made in the canola oil and the Crisco were identical. If anything, the Crisco chips were crispier.

“Just like those old Southern ladies always told me: Always fry in Crisco,” Harding said.

I wasn’t convinced, though, and asked Harding to bump it up a notch (as Emeril might say). He pulled out two chicken breasts and pan-seared one in butter and oil — in the classic French tradition — and the other in Crisco.

I chopped shallots.

As the chicken cooked, Harding readied some wine, heavy cream and mustard, and I realized that he was cooking his own version of a legendary dish known as “Kuntzman’s Seduction Chicken,” a main course that dates back to my single days, when I served it whenever I wanted to impress a woman. For years, I had sporadic success with the dish — although all that butter and cream typically left my dates feeling bloated and in need of a nap (a chaste nap, to boot).

Like so many things, if I knew then what I know now, I might have done much better: The “Seduction Chicken” cooked in the Crisco actually turned out lighter and more flavorful than the one Harding made in butter.

When there are so many more enjoyable ways to destroy your body (heroin, for example!), dying from fried chicken seems like one of the lamer ways to go. Then again, the contrarian pushback is obviously on:

Banning [trans fats] may not save 500 lives a year in New York, but it may well save some. Whether you turn out to be one of the lucky ones would depend not just on the heart risks you bring to the table, but also on what replacements the cooks use.

For many foods requiring hard fats, particularly baked goods, the tastiest alternatives to partially hydrogenated oils are tropical oils, like palm oil and coconut oil, or butter. Loaded with artery-blocking saturated fat, they are the very ingredients health advocates shooed us away from not so long ago.

New York’s health department has encouraged restaurants to return to butter, for instance, if that’s what it takes to rid certain menu items of trans fat. Saturated fat is at least a natural constituent of our diets, according to officials, whereas trans fats are essentially chemical abominations that can no longer be countenanced.

For restaurant patrons who long ago learned to avoid butter and skip the bacon, all this amounts to a Hobbesian dilemma. Better saturated fat, the heart-stopping devil you know? Or trans fat, the heart-stopping devil you’ve just been introduced to?

No surprise, then, that many people are cynical about the proposed ban. Grand public health gestures make for perilous public relations. Not so long ago, remember, eggs were causing heart attacks. Vegetable oils were causing cancer.

And the saturated fats that we’re supposed to be using again — whose idea was it to avoid those? Oh. Right.

Where’s this coming from, the freakin’ Manhattan Institute or something? Nope, just the Times Health section . . . this from the same publication that opined “New Yorkers could use more pressure toward healthy behavior.”