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How to make McDonalds french fries
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- arthurdent 16y agoThe vinegar hack is brilliant. Cooking is chemistry and should be treated as such.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- ars 16y agoI wonder if cream of tartar would work. (I really hate vinegar, it smells like rotten food to me.)
- someone_here 16y agoWell, it is in a sense.
- KC8ZKF 16y agoMcDonald's main problem is that they sacrifice quality for consistency. I can understand why a chain restaurant would want that. I can even understand why a customer would want that. What I can't understand is why a home cook would want that. Pommes frites are fresh potatoes cooked in animal fat, and seasoned with salt and rosemary. http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuart_spivack/4205683848/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuart_spivack/4205683848/
- rbranson 16y agoIf you read the article, he actually tries to improve on McDonalds fries. He says they get soggy too quickly, and tinkers with the recipe to achieve longer crispness.
- KC8ZKF 16y ago"McDonald's used to fry their potatoes in beef tallow, giving them extra flavor and making them extra crisp, but they stopped doing that years ago." Something home cooks can still do.
- micheljansen 16y agoI am pretty curious about what the effect would be on flavour. Animal fat is pretty bad for you though, and probably much cheaper to come by so I imagine those are just a few reasons to go with vegetable oil over animal fat.
- ams6110 16y agoIn retrospect the beef lard was probably no worse than the trans-fat oil they replaced it with (they have since eliminated the trans fats). But the prior poster is correct... McDonalds fries have never been as good since they stopped using the beef tallow.
- delackner 16y agoActually "I read somewhere" years ago, mainstream publication citing a then-new study, that trans-fat oil works in the body in some meaningful way 30x worse than animal fat. The details are too snore-inducing to remember. Just eat lots of vegetables and it won't matter if you eat a small bit of whatever.
- tptacek 16y agoI've never fried anything in tallow, and while I keep good lard (and bacon fat) for confit, I never fry with it. However, I do fry things in duck fat, and it makes an enormous difference, both in flavor and mouthfeel. The "best" french fries are, it's said, fried in horse fat (I first read than in Steingarten, a dubious source, but have heard it backed up repeatedly). If you Google, there's an article with someone actually tracking down horse fat and frying frites in it.
- rue 16y agoSome people - me included, rarely as I eat them - prefer McDonald's fries to most others.
- philwelch 16y agoI used to prefer McDonald's fries, and I still prefer them over other fast food, but most bars and sit-down restaurants seem to have better fries to me now. (And, unlike McDonald's, they will give you barbecue sauce.)
- danudey 16y agoI've never had a McDonald's refuse me barbecue sauce, mcchicken sauce, etc. whenever I ask for it, regardless of what my order was.
- pyre 16y agoMore recently they will only give you one bbq sauce with their chicken nuggets, and even asking for an extra one isn't free. Asking for bbq sauce w/ fries is an extra charge.
- matwood 16y agoI agree. I don't each fast food much at all, but the only craving I get is for McDs fries. When they are done right they very tasty regardless of how unhealthy they might be :)
- DrJokepu 16y agoResponding to you first two sentences, I don't think that's actually a bad thing. It's very far from being the best food ever but it has a consistent quality - you can walk into any McDonald's restaurant anywhere in the world and you will know exactly what you will get. Sometimes (especially when you travel) you don't have that many options when it comes to food and you know that at least you won't get food poisoning at McDonald's.
- jrnkntl 16y agoThat is some serious reverse engineering
- RevRal 16y agoYou know you're awesome when you bust out the micrometer to systematize the rendering of perfect french fries.
- joe_bleau 16y agoThat's actually a dial caliper, not an outside micrometer.
- RevRal 16y agoWell wither me toes, I've been calling them micrometers my whole life. Thanks!
- HeyLaughingBoy 16y agoNot only that, but it's a Starrett caliper: the kind of pricey, high quality tool that I drool over. ...and about the only interesting part of the article. I enjoy cooking and I love potatoes; I even have a dozen or so potato plants/tubers/whatever growing in the garden. But even I realized years ago that the key to good french fries with low effort is to buy the OreIda "fast food" fries and cook them myself in the fat of my choice. I've tried all the methods I read about and still the premade ones are better. Something I've never been able to say about any other food I cook.
- joe_bleau 16y agoMy dad the machinist prefers Brown & Sharpe or Fowler (depending on the particular tool) to Starrett. Styling mostly; it seems like Starrett stuff has the old fashioned look and typefaces, whereas the B&S has a more 60s clean and simple hi-tech look. I actually have the same model Starrett dial caliper pictured in the link.
- stefanp 16y agotl;dr but this reminds me a lot of "The Quest For French Fry Supremacy", a two part article on Cooking Issues. http://www.cookingissues.com/2010/04/27/the-quest-for-french-fry-supremacy-part-1/ http://www.cookingissues.com/2010/04/27/the-quest-for-french...
- stfp 16y agoHmm, I'm not sure I get the downvotes - is it the "tl-dr" part ? No biggie, but it'd be a shame, the article I linked to is as impressive, it not more in terms of cooking-engineeringness.
- ryanelkins 16y agoYeah, I would guess people don't like "Hey, I didn't actually read this, but here is something that I imagine must be related." (Even if it does turn out to be relevant and worthwhile.)
- pyre 16y agoTrue, but I can also see it from the other side: "I feel that I have something worthwhile to contribute, but I don't have time to read the entire article, so I'll just post it here in the hopes that someone finds it interesting/relevant." I think that it would be somewhat of a stifling approach to just make a blanket proclamation that no one can enter the discussion unless they have full read the article.
- ars 16y agoJust leave out the tl;dr part. You don't need to justify your posting of a link. Just post it and say what it's about.
- ComputerGuru 16y agoOT: why do you have two accounts?
- bryanh 16y agoThis is an incredible site, I just read http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/04/cook-your-meat-in-a-beer-cooler-the-worlds-best-sous-vide-hack.html http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/04/cook-your-meat-in-a-beer-... on a whim and am trying it tonight. Very cool.
- lincolnq 16y agoI have done that twice now. It works amazingly well, especially if you have a good grill to finish them on.
- tptacek 16y agoBroken record: if you're liking the results you're getting from the beer cooler, drop a couple hundred on a PID-controlled rice cooker setup. You don't need to shell out for a Sous Vide Supreme appliance to get professional results (in fact, a friend who wrote a review for the SVS was hard pressed to come up with any advantage to the SVS over the "ghetto" setup, other than that it doesn't make your kitchen look like a meth lab.)
- jarek 16y agoWith mix of professional and personal curiosity I'd like to ask: what control do cheaper rice cookers use, and what does PID add? Super precise temperature control with no oscillation is the only thing I can think of -- is it that important?
- tptacek 16y agoRice cookers don't include PID controls. They have "hot" and "warm". You can cook with them (Roger Ebert had a great blog post about his one-pot wonder dishes), but that's essentially a gentle form of crock pot cooking. Super precise temperature control is one of the most important developments in all of cooking. If you have it, you can take almost any protein or almost any vegetable, select a final cooked state out of a (tiny) book, punch it into the control, and walk away for an hour, an afternoon, or a fortnight and come back to a 100% guaranteed perfect product. Three example implications: * You can buy $30 steaks, bag them, throw them in a rice cooker in the morning, go to work, come home, and have them perfectly rare-medium-rare all the way through. I'd say "better than at a steakhouse" if so many steakhouses weren't apparently switching up to cook steaks this way. * You can take a tough braise cut (short ribs, octopus), bag it, stick it in the rice cooker for a couple days, and pull it out medium rare and tender. Tender medium rare short ribs are a novel product of precise temperature control; you can't do them on a grill. * You can take a vegetable and cook it at a target temperature that breaks down starches but not pectin and get unique textures out of them. Keller, who has obviously better equipment than we do, combines this with compression to get steak-like textures out of things like melons.
- tszming 16y agoSome interesting stuffs - Patents related to French fries. http://www.google.com/patents?lr=&q=french+fries&btnG=Search+Patents http://www.google.com/patents?lr=&q=french+fries&btn...
- wazoox 16y agoThe premise is wrong. I mean, McDonald's fries are about OK as far as frankenfood goes, but they are really horrible compared to anything home-made with fresh potatoes, no question about it. They're too small, they have absolutely zero taste, they're greasy... This is supposed to be a model to follow? Gimme a break.
- JimmyL 16y agoThis guys picked something he likes - McDonald's fries - and did some impressive food-hacking to revere-engineer and improve them. Regardless of your thoughts on the thing he's imitating, surely you can respect the rigor and discipline the author applied to the problem. He's not saying "this is how you make the world's best fries" - he's saying "if you really like McDonald's fries (like I do), here's how to replicate them". If you don't like that type of fry, then don't make them.
- wazoox 16y agoI'm all for the food hacking and the article was quite interesting, however I shivers to the idea of McDonald's as a cooking reference.
- jeff18 16y agoHe clearly defines the characteristics that make a good french fry and then explains how to match that consistently. He concludes that almost all of McDonald's practices (freezing the fries) are not simply economically important, but essential to the taste as he defines them.
- sushi 16y agoI have the RSS feed of this site for quite some time and this site delivers every single time with amazing recipes.
- micheljansen 16y agoFor those who enjoyed reading this post, I have some recommendations: * Anything by Hervé This (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hervé_This#Bibliography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hervé_This#Bibliography) * Nicholas Kurti's "But the Crackling is Superb: An Anthology on Food and Drink by Fellows and Foreign Members of The Royal Society of London" (ISBN 0-7503-0488-X) * Stuff by Heston Blumenthal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heston_Blumenthal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heston_Blumenthal) I first learned of the obsession with perfecting food through understanding the chemistry behind it through Cook & Chemist (http://www.cookandchemist.com http://www.cookandchemist.com). Unfortunately, the two books they have published are in Dutch and there appear to be no translations yet.
- davnola 16y agoMay I add 'On Food and Cooking' by Harold McGee (ISBN 0684843285)? McGee also writes at http://curiouscook.com/ http://curiouscook.com/.
- tptacek 16y agoOn Food And Cooking is an awesome, awesome book. It's on my bookshelf next to my reading chair; I flip it open to a random page any time I get bored. The charts and sidebars alone (for instance, breakdowns of the volatiles in different herbs and spice) are worth the price of admission. It's also written absurdly well.
- mtts 16y ago-1 redundant. These are heros of mine as well. The major influence Heston Blumenthal has had in my (sparsely equipped kitchen) is this: fennel should be microwaved. Wrap the stuff in microwave foil and zap it five times for one minute (leaving time inbetween to allow the heat to dissipate). Best fennel you've ever had. Also works with asparagus.
- whatusername 16y agomicrowave foil? Am I missing something -- by "zap" it are you really suggesting putting aluminum foil in the microwave -- or is that something else.
- dangrossman 16y agoThe way McDonalds makes its fries isn't a secret. They let Food Network film part of a documentary on fried food in one of their french fry factories, and showed the entire process from potato to frozen product ready to ship. It was basically cleaning and sizing (large potatoes cut in half), shot through pipes by water pressure with a grate on the end of the pipe that cuts the potato into fries, steamed to make the inside fluffy, then fried twice at two temperatures.
- Nycto 16y agoWhile that may be true, the interesting thing about this article is that it presents a recipe that can be reproduced in an average kitchen. I'm no chef, so I don't know if this has done before, but if it hasn't, it's pretty cool.
- tptacek 16y agoThat's kind of like saying that the way Google processes mail for Google Mail isn't a secret. It's not, but knowing how "it's done" and knowing how they "actually do it" are two different things.
- morphir 16y agoprove that algorithmically, thank you.
- SoftwareMaven 16y agoI think the point is around things like "What temperature do you fry at?", "How hot should the steam bath be?", etc. The details make all the difference.
- mseebach 16y ago9 ! = 362 880 vs. (define (factorial n) (let fact ([i n] [acc 1]) (if (zero? i) acc (fact (- i 1) (* acc i)))))
- 16y ago
- soyelmango 16y agoWith a bit of social engineering... aka "asking someone who works in a McD kitchen"... he could have got the oil cooker temperature and timings. The McD website, or a pamphlet you can get instore, would list the ingredients. Anyway, kudos to the writer for doing it the hard way. Finally, telling a McD fry lover (I put my hand up to that!) that the fries are rubbish is like telling a smoker that cigarettes are bad for them. We know.
- Splines 16y ago> asking someone who works in a McD kitchen While that may have answered the "how", only through this type of process could the author have answered the "why".
- soyelmango 16y ago...as well as discovering how/why _not_ to do it, which can be more valuable knowledge.
- ivankirigin 16y agoIt has been too long since I had a fry party. I think I'll try this. A fry party is exactly what it sounds like. You make kilos of fries and dozens of dips and get drunk on the power.
- Raphael 16y agoI prefer darker, unblanched fries.
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- Aegean 16y agoI am curious to know - do they use preservatives or unnatural additives?
- code_duck 16y agoThey don't know how to make anything without preservatives and additives. They don't care. Of course they're full of absolute death wax, not to mention all the petro/organochlorines the potatoes, canola, corn and soybeans were probably soaked in while being grown (highly likely to be genetically engineered, too) here you go, from http://nutrition.mcdonalds.com/nutritionexchange/ingredientslist.pdf http://nutrition.mcdonalds.com/nutritionexchange/ingredients... Potatoes, vegetable oil (canola oil, hydrogenated soybean oil, natural beef flavor [wheat and milk derivatives], citric acid [preservative]), dextrose, sodium acid pyrophosphate (maintain color), salt. Prepared in vegetable oil (Canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil with TBHQ and citric acid added to preserve freshness). Dimethylpolysiloxane added as an antifoaming agent. CONTAINS: WHEAT AND MILK *(Natural beef flavor contains hydrolyzed wheat and hydrolyzed milk as starting ingredients)
- danielle17 16y agoI worked at McDonalds long ago, and I am a huge fan. If you are interested in understanding why they are so incredible, make sure to read "Grinding It Out" which is the story of McDonalds told by Ray Croc, who turned a small local store into one of the greatest franchises the world has ever known. He was in his mid-50s when he stated, and the whole thing is just inspiring for entrepreneurs no matter how many time you might have failed before. But I digress... The thing about working at McDonalds is that you learn exactly what everything tastes like - and you notice all the little changes. For example, the difference in quality between a quarter pound patty used in the quarter pounder and double quarter pounder, and a "10" (1/10 pound) patty used in the regular cheeseburger and double-cheeseburger. I have eaten everything on the McDonalds menu, and can tell you what the most disgustingly unhealthy thing by caloric density is (not the fries!). So, the most important factor we noticed about the french fries was how old the fry grease was. Each night 1 of three things happen to the fry grease:' 1) it is skimmed for any remnants of fries and left to simmer at a low warm temperature for the next day 2) it is run through a cleaning machine (2-3 times per week) 3) it is completely replaced by a technician (every 1 or 2 weeks depending on time of year) New grease is very clear, like fresh motor oil you put into your car. As the grease gets older turns more and more golden brown as it gets more carbon in it from little bits of fries that break off and burn in the hot oil and disintegrate. Eventually, right before it is replaced, the grease is very brown and the fries will actually come out with tiny brownish bits on them. Some people really liked the "dirty grease fries" but the majority of staff knew when the best french fries were made - when the grease was about 4 days old, right after the first cleaning. I can't tell you exactly why, but these fries were the yummiest to the point where I would only eat them at this point (gotta stay thin somehow working there!) and crew members would bring in their kids on that day to eat. Its also important to know that fries are never ever cooked in the same grease used for chicken nuggets, fish filets, etc. I'd be curious to know what that tastes like if anyone has every broken the rules and tried it, but that was a religious issue at the McDonalds locations I worked at so we never did. Anyway, if you're curious and have a regular McDonalds you can always ask them when the last time the grease was cleaned or changed.
- brianwillis 16y agoYou really should have been filtering your oil ("run through a cleaning machine") daily. The filtering process removes the carbon build up that causes oil to degrade. The labour cost to doing this daily is far smaller that the cost of the oil you save.
- cacaolat 16y agoThis is one of best blog posts I have ever read!
- malkia 16y agoOkay, I'm just not used their taste. Nothing is better than fresh potatoes, made by my wife with feta cheese on top of them and beer. I like them to have some meat in them.
- code_duck 16y agoI really don't like fries of this style. I'll take a real, honest fench fry where one can tell it is made from a sliced potato. Five Guys, for instance, makes excellent fries. They appear to do so by cutting up a potato and immersing it in boiling oil. Imagine that! I have absolutely no desire to eat processed, partially synthesized corporate potato product.