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.
Soak the fries in cold water to rinse off excess starch to help get the fries crispy. Make sure to heat oil to 125 Celsius for the first fry and to 175 Celsius for the final fry. Double fry your fries to first cook out the potatoes, and then to get them golden brown and crispy! Season with salt after the second fry!
The taste of a french fry is largely determined by the cook- ing oil. For decades McDonald's cooked its french fries in a mixture of about 7 percent cottonseed oil and 93 percent beef tallow. The mixture gave the fries their unique flavor-and more saturated beef fat per ounce than a McDonald's hamburger.
Beef tallow was eliminated from the famous French fry formula and replaced with 100% vegetable oil. The results were French fries with zero cholesterol and 45% less fat per serving than before, but also a plummet in stock prices and countless consumers saddened by a drop in flavor.
And generally speaking, restaurants fry their french fries twice: once at a lower temperature to cook the inside of the fry, and then a second time at a higher temperature to brown the exterior. As you can see, there are a lot of steps involved. This shouldn't discourage you from trying to make french fries.
Casual Chain Restaurants Options
This means most fries you encounter in casual restaurants are not going to be gluten-free, even if they don't include gluten ingredients. Some restaurants serve fries coated with flour which makes them crispier, but unsafe if you can't have gluten.
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. The cooks fry them twice, first blanching them until slightly limp in peanut oil heated to 325 degrees, and again in 375-degree oil to crisp and brown them.
We use a blend including canola and sunflower oils to cook with. Like all vegetable oils, it's cholesterol free and has 85% less trans-fat than our previous blend.
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.
According to McDonald's, blanching also eliminates enzymatic activity which prevents spoilage and develops a fluffy interior, similar to a baked potato, for better texture. French fries are seen in an ingredient bath in this video released by McDonald's showing how their food is made.
In the 1990s, as health concerns over saturated fat reached an all-time high, McDonald's faced a backlash against the use of beef tallow, and worried about losing customers, the chain switched to vegetable oil. Unfortunately, many customers said the new texture and taste weren't up to the mark.
Do you use real potatoes for your fries? 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.
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!
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.
What kind of oil do I use? The key here is using something with a high smoke point. Neutral-tasting oils are great for frying: peanut, canola, vegetable, safflower, grape-seed, et cetera.
McDonald's wanted to keep its signature beefy flavor but without the beef fat itself, so it came up with a solution. Now the fast-food chain adds “natural beef flavor” to its vegetable oil to give its fries their irresistibly meaty taste.
Without moisture, mold can't grow, and McDonald's french fries are soaked in hydrogenated oil — saturated fat which increases shelf life and maintains flavor. As the french fries cool, they're essentially sealed by the hardening saturated fat, which in turn seals off moisture.
Beef tallow was initially used because the supplier for McDonald's couldn't afford vegetable oil. In the 1990s, as health concerns over saturated fat reached an all-time high, McDonald's faced a backlash against the use of beef tallow, and worried about losing customers, the chain switched to vegetable oil.
The potatoes we use to make our famous chips generally come from Tassie and Victoria and the high-oleic canola oil we use for cooking them is also Australian-grown.
KFC completed the move to a special type of non-genetically modified, high-oleic canola oil this week in response to customer concerns about the environmental impacts of palm oil production.
Consider the following enemies of cooking oil: Oxygen, salt, soap, heat, carbon buildup and water. All of these elements pose a great threat to the quality of your restaurant's cooking oil and food you serve, and are abundant in any commercial kitchen.
Frying fresh-cut potatoes.
Soaking peeled, washed, and cut fries in cold water overnight removes excess potato starch, which prevents fries from sticking together and helps achieve maximum crispness.
Before all that, though, the secret is to briefly poach them in boiling water (or "blanch" them) before they go into the hot oil. This ensures that the fries are cooked all the way through before getting crisped up in the fryer.
Unless a battered fry, they are not adding in salt during the process. I recommend not salting the fries till they come out of the fryer and even then, waiting for an order before salting as the fries can turn limp prematurely if salted too soon.