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Ultimate Geekness in Cooking Fries

posted by LaminatorX on Saturday March 01 2014, @06:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the and-now-for-something-completely-different dept.

c0lo writes:

"More appropriate to an (no existing) idle section, no longer news, but it made a fascinating reading for me:
How to Make Perfect Thin and Crisp French Fries going the full range of:

  • economic espionage involving Scavenger Hunt and social engineering
  • reverse engineering
  • original research and method improvement
  • disclosure of the method the good side of it: no patent"
 
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  • (Score: 1) by anubi on Sunday March 02 2014, @04:23AM

    by anubi (2828) on Sunday March 02 2014, @04:23AM (#9445)

    I note the link posted at The Burger Lab:

    For the next phase, I started doing some research and caught a lucky break by finding this article online, which essentially runs through the whole process of what goes on in a McDonald's potato processing plant as told by LeAron Plackett, a thirteen-year-long employee. The parts that interested me most were on the second page:

    has been deleted.

    If you are interested in this content, I think I would quickly save off this page, as Kenji insightfully copied and pasted the relevant passages to his page.

    I am going to copy and paste it here again... just to try to keep info like this from being lost to fear of some litigator's pen...

    The fries are then flumed out of the A.D.R. room to the "blancher." The blancher is a large vessel filled with one hundred and seventy degree water. The trip through the blancher takes about fifteen minutes... After the fries leave the blancher, they are dried and then it's off to the "fryer," which is filled with one hundred percent vegetable oil. The oil is heated to three hundred and sixty five degrees and the fries take a fifty second dip before being conveyed to the "de-oiler shaker," where excess oil is "shook off."

    I get the idea the A.D.R room is where the potato peeling ( Abrasive Dermal Removal? ) and cutting into sticks take place, as fluming hints that the transport mechanism is a stream of water ( the blancher is full of 170 degree water ).

    I thought it was very interesting that the freezing the fries after doing the above to them is actually an integral part of the process.

    I would imagine McDonalds corp will be all over a few webmasters with takedown orders... not to keep YOU from doing this at home, but there are lots of other large-chain fast-food operations which will gladly use this research to their own benefit. This was one of those "trade secrets", and its out now.

    I betcha Kenji's article stirred up more than a few business meetings at McDonald's corporate headquarters.

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]

  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday March 02 2014, @10:49AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday March 02 2014, @10:49AM (#9618)

    The 170 degree water baffled me a while, given that water boils at 100 degrees ... until I recognized that obviously degree Fahrenheit were meant. For anyone as unfamiliar with Fahrenheit as me: 170 degree Fahrenheit are about 77 degree Celsius. And 365 degree Fahrenheit are 185 degree Celsius.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.