Blanching: The Reason Why French Fries Taste Better Your potatoes need to take two separate dips in hot oil to reach restaurant quality. Oil-blanching is a two-part process that reduces the moisture and starch content in your fries, helping them crisp up.
However much you want to fool yourself, air-fried and baked french fries never taste as good as potatoes fried in hot oil. So, if you make it a point to always eat "healthy" fries at home, you're not getting the full flavor experience at home as you do from deep-fried potatoes from restaurants.
"It's because McDonald's cooks their fries with beef flavoring mixed within their vegetable oil," divulged the content creator.
Image courtesy of McDonald's. To make their fried menu items healthier, McDonald's began cooking potato sides with vegetable oil in 1990. But the fast-food joint wasn't willing to sacrifice that signature flavor: McDonald's added natural beef flavoring to the oil to preserve the taste customers had come to love.
No problem. Although we've found the majority of our customers prefer a light sprinkling of salt on their French Fries, if you'd prefer them without salt, simply request this when you order and our staff will sort it out.
Not only do fried foods often contain extra sugar and sodium to make them dangerously tasty, but they also soak up some of the fat from the oil they're cooked in. That oil likely contains trans fats, an especially unhealthy kind of fat that's cheap to make and helps food last a long time.
To mimic the chain's original oil blend, the oil is laced with natural flavoring to replicate that mouthwatering smell. In other words, the delicious scent we know and love is actually the smell of potatoes cooked in beef fat, an aroma so powerful it makes the fries seem even tastier!
Yep. The most common potatoes we use for McDonald's fries include the Russet Burbank, Russet Ranger, Umatilla Russet and the Shepody—varieties known for producing a flavorful fry that's crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside.
The taste will be familiar to Americans 40 and older who visited fast-food restaurants before 1990, the year McDonald's stopped using animal lard to cook its popular fries.
The soaking, Mr. Nasr said, is the secret to the crisp texture of the fries. It draws out the starch, making them more rigid and less likely to stick together.
Most deep fryers operate at a temperature between 350- and 400-degrees Fahrenheit, making canola oil a highly stable choice. Furthermore, canola oil tends to be one of the most affordable oils on the market, making it a popular choice for restaurants that require large volumes of oil and frequent oil changes.
As such, it's not surprising that many extremely popular — and even astronomically expensive — restaurants of today serve french fries that are cooked straight from frozen.
Because of their starch content, french fries are a high-glycemic food, posing a cardiovascular and metabolic health risk. However, they are high in fibre, water, and nutrients, which are beneficial. Therefore, limiting them and viewing them as an unhealthy once-in-a-while treat rather than a staple may be wise.
Added to this are the high costs of energy, oil, packaging, and transport. According to Bas Janssens, researcher at Wageningen University & Research, the price increase of those potatoes are a result of the dry summer. "Especially in Germany, Belgium and France, this led to mediocre harvests.
Burger King fries are typically made from potatoes, canola and/or sunflower oil, and a blend of salt, sugar, and other ingredients like monosodium glutamate, dextrose, sodium acid pyrophosphate, natural flavorings and preservatives.
Our World Famous Fries® are made from quality potatoes, including Russet Burbank, Ranger Russet, Umatilla Russet and the Shepody. The suppliers we work with first peel, cut and blanche the potatoes. They then dry, partially fry and quickly freeze the fries for our restaurants.
“It's because McDonald's cooks [its] fries with beef flavouring mixed within their vegetable oil,” Jordan said. “So that's why the fries taste so good, but also so different from everybody else's.”
If you've ever wondered why McDonald's hamburger patties are designed to be so thin, the answer is that these patties simply last longer. Food with high moisture content is far more susceptible to rot, as bacteria needs water to thrive.
At the beginning of the potato season, when we're using newer potatoes, the naturally-occurring sugar content is very low and we do need to add a small amount of sugar dextrose to our fries to ensure they maintain that golden colour.
Acrylamide is a chemical created in certain foods that are cooked at high temperatures. Because chips are sliced so thin and fried so hot, they're even heavier in acrylamide than French fries (which, sadly, 7 out of 9 experts warn against).
It warns that even small portions of fried food can cause damage to the heart and arteries. Published in the journal Heart, the analysis shows that there is 28% higher risk of cardiovascular conditions amongst those who eat fried food every week, as compared to those who don't.
A medium portion of fries has more calories at 337 and only 3.3g of protein. When it comes to carbs, the burger has 31g while the fries have a whopping 42g.