Issue 5 | 13th March, 2021
Hi, and welcome to the fifth issue of the Curiosity Catalogue.
Today, we talk about something we love— the French fry. Surprise, surprise, it isn’t actually French. Though its origins are debated, it likely hails from the South of Belgium, where it was a staple for locals in winter-time when rivers froze and deprived them of fish.
Despite this deception, there’s no denying the deliciousness of the French fry, or the sincerity of society’s love for it. With a crisp outer coating the colour of the sun, a soft inside and just the right amount of seasoning, a well made fry is, perhaps, the pinnacle of potato-ey goodness.
I vaguely remember my first french fry - it was at a McDonald’s about two decades ago. There wasn’t a McDonald’s in Hyderabad, where my family lived at the time, and so on our summer trips to Delhi a visit to the golden arches became a special treat. I remember gorging on Maharaja Macs bigger than my 6-year old face, and polishing off the delectable fries that came with it. I can’t pretend that these fries inspired spiritual revelation, but they were definitely part of why I was overweight for the next decade.
This story isn’t mine alone - McDonald’s introduced French fries to fast food, and took them across the world. This history begins, as you can imagine, in the USA.
Versions of crisp potato snacks had been brought to the USA from Europe since the 1700s, but the thin and long fries we’re familiar with arrived with World War One returnees who became fond of it while stationed in the southern Belgium, where, as I said earlier, it was a staple (locals here spoke French, hence the ‘French’ fry).
It wasn’t an instant best-seller, though. While today it may epitomise easy-made fast-food, making a good French fry from scratch is serious business. The perfect French fry is crisp on the outside, and soft on the inside. This isn’t easy to do, since potatoes contain a lot of water that can quickly make them soggy. This problem prevented large-scale fry supply early on, and is proving tricky to deal with in different ways today.
The fast-food French fry began it’s life in San Bernadino, California, at the site of the original McDonald’s. Here, the McDonald’s brothers ‘cured’ potatoes by leaving them to dry for days in the desert climate, reducing their water content. This set-up wasn’t easy to replicate, and so not many did.
Ray Kroc, a milkshake-maker salesman at the time, saw an opportunity here. He loved the fries, and more importantly, saw how much everyone who had one seemed to love them. According to writer and French-fry-fanatic Malcolm Gladwell, these fries, even more than the burgers, inspired him to buy the franchising rights to the restaurant. He developed special technology and preparation techniques to get the fries just right on a consistent basis. With that, French fries entered the lives of more and more people.
A key ingredient in this special preparation was Formula 47, a fat compound which the fries were, well, fried in. It was primarily made of beef fat or tallow, which was a hard fat. As Malcolm Gladwell explains, these fats are chemically stable, and have a thick and creamy texture (like butter, which is also a hard fat, and at most temperatures is solid or semi-solid, unlike, say vegetable oil). According to Gladwell, being cooked in beef tallow gave the fries a truly divine taste and texture, and had people hooked on to them. Unfortunately, such French fries haven’t been known to the world for the last thirty years. One man’s heart attack ensured this.
Phil Sokolof made a fortune early on selling construction material. He lived a decently healthy life - no smoking, regular exercise, but as he said himself, “was a student in the greasy hamburger school of nutrition for my first 43 years.” This fondness for hamburgers led to excessively high cholesterol and eventually a heart attack at age 43.
This heart attack led to revelation, and Sokolof ditched his business to become a public health messiah. Saturated fats, for which he blamed his cholesterol, became hsi greatest foe, and he swore to vanquish them. He founded an organisation called the National Heart Savers Association, took out ads in major newspapers to warn the public of the doom that awaited them, and lobbied politicians and CEOs of food companies to stop the use of these compounds. Armed with wealth and determination, both seemingly inexhaustible in supply, he took on powerful vested interests. Eventually, he set his targets on McDonald’s.
He didn’t hold back any punches. In a full-page ad with the headline “The Poisoning of America”, he blamed McDonald’s for feeding the country unhealthy amounts of fat. The next day, he fired criticisms directly at a McDonald’s senior executive on national television, raising particular ire at the beef tallow their fries were cooked in.
Slowly but surely, victories came his way. On the 23rd of July, 1990, he won what might have been his biggest till then - McDonald’s agreed to change the recipe for its fries. It would swap out beef tallow for a combination of different vegetable oils; saturated fats be gone.
History hasn’t looked at this encounter kindly - and it’s not just because Gladwell and many others like him had their hearts broken by the allegedly sub-standard fries that emerged from cookers filled with vegetable oil. To paraphrase him, “the fat is as much a constituent of the French fry as the potato, so when you change fat, you change the fry.”
This oil was chock-full of trans fats, which were later discovered to be even worse for health than saturated fats. What’s more, like I mentioned earlier, vegetable oils are soft fats, and chemically less stable. They release odd compounds at high temperatures, many of which coat surfaces around in an unpleasant grime (and apparently caused piles of McDonald’s cooking aprons to spontaneously combust as well).
Though Sokolof’s PR campaigns ended here, McDonald’s’ beef tallow-woes weren’t over yet. This time, their problems came from India.
In 2001, as McDonald’s entered the Indian market, it was quickly caught up in controversy. In truth, it’s troubles started in the US, where certain Hindu individuals suspected that the company still used beef to cook their fries, despite their claims otherwise. A lawsuit and lab-test later, their suspicions were confirmed. The fast food chain admitted to using a “minuscule amount of beef fat” in initial preparation before they were shipped out to restaurants in the USA. When the news reached India, the company faced severe backlash. Restaurant windows were allegedly smashed in, statues of Ronald McDonald smeared with dung, and many called for it to be shut permanently. McDonald’s maintained that it didn’t use any animal fat in fry preparation here, and in time, the controversy seems to have blown over.
Our story doesn’t end here, though. Despite these controversies and the apparent sub-standard nature of the ones we eat, French fries have soldiered on, working their way into our hearts (quite literally). Still, they’ve had to evolve to stay relevant as times and eating habits have changed.
Crisp as they may be fresh out of hot oil, fries go soggy real fast. When this happens, they become about as appealing as the malai on a cup of chai. They were originally made to stay good for about 5-7 minutes. This works if you’re re eating them at a restaurant, but not if you’re picking them up in drive-thrus, which is how most Americans started ordering them.
According to this episode of Planet Money, making them last longer was much easier said than done. Hot oil turns the water in the centre of a fry to steam, and helps keep it soft on the inside. This steam in turn keeps the oil out of the centre of the fry, ensuring that only the outside turns crisp.
As fries go cold, though, the water in the centre starts moving outwards, turning the surface soggy, and the fry unappealing. French fry developers (and yes, this is a real job) needed to find ways to keep the barrier between the outside and inside stronger for longer. To do this, they developed a starch wash that fries were bathed in during processing. When fried, this wash would coat them crispness for about 15-20 minutes.
Though this was good enough for the drive-thru era, the explosion of food delivery apps and services has posed a new problem, and this time not limited to the US. The average home delivery for fast-food in many cities is about 30 minutes, by which time these fries go limp. New washes and techniques were required once more, and after two years of Tinkering, a food processing firm called Lamb Weston struck gold. They created fries that stayed good for about 45 minutes. With this, they found a way to help the French fry maintain its deliciousness in the era of delivery.
The round-up
A lot of my information for this issue, especially about the history with Sokolof, came from this brilliant episode of Revisionist History by Malcolm Gladwell. It’s available on podcast streaming apps as well (season 2, episode 9). In the episode after this, Gladwell looked into why exactly the science on fats in our diet was wrong, and the conspiracies that changed the way we eat.
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If you’re a fan of food science and food writing, you should look at Krish Ashok’s recent book Masala Lab. It breaks down the basics of Indian cooking, and is as hilarious as it is informative. If you want a taste of what awaits in the book, you can start with his columns in Mint.
If you’re looking for ways to spend your weekend, you can try playing this oddly addictive McDonald’s online parody game. (I’ve lost more hours to it myself than I care to admit).
About me: I'm Shantanu Kishwar, a lover of fun trivia and well-made hummus. I currently work as a Teaching Assistant at FLAME University, Pune. You can follow my sporadic updates on Twitter and Instagram, if you’d like.
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