Why do fries taste so good

The bug feeds on red cactus berries, and color from the berries accumulates in the females and their unhatched larvae. The insects are collected, dried, and ground into a pigment.

It takes about 70, of them to produce a pound of carmine, which is used to make processed foods look pink, red, or purple. He could easily be mistaken for a British diplomat or the owner of a West End brasserie with two Michelin stars. In the absence of public credit or acclaim, the small and secretive fraternity of flavor chemists praise one another's work. By analyzing the flavor formula of a product, Grainger can often tell which of his counterparts at a rival firm devised it.

Grainger had brought a dozen small glass bottles from the lab. Before placing each strip of paper in front of my nose, I closed my eyes. Then I inhaled deeply, and one food after another was conjured from the glass bottles.

Grainger's most remarkable creation took me by surprise. After closing my eyes, I suddenly smelled a grilled hamburger. But when I opened my eyes, I saw just a narrow strip of white paper and a flavorist with a grin. Share Email Print Facebook Twitter. Coronavirus, Know the facts 3. How do you Refry fries? Is it bad to eat cold chips? Which foods should not be reheated?

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They developed potatoes like the Clearwater Russet and Blazer Russet through a process called plant breeding. Plant breeding helps the researchers select the traits they want in a plant, like a certain shape, size, or a high amount of protein. The team is helping farmers learn which potatoes people will buy and want to eat. In Washington state, we grow more than 9 billion pounds of potatoes every year and most of them will go on to become French fries.

You can also whip up some fries right at home with the help of a grown-up. My friends at WSU Extension even have a recipe for you to try: crispy potato wedges. But there's a reason the thin-cut McDonald's fry has emerged as the king of french fries. Measuring no more than a quarter-inch across, they represent the perfect balance between golden, crispy outside, and fluffy, baked potato inside; any thinner, and french fries turn into nests of too-crunchy mouth-destroying coating, totally devoid of any starchy potato goodness.

Any thicker, as in a so-called "steak fry," and the crispy element is lost, resulting in a french fry that has more in common with a baked potato, and not in a good way. According to The New York Times , the thin-cut McDonald's-style French fry represents the perfect balance; a fry that can "emerge with enough crispness to stand up to a cheeseburger, enough taste to go with a lobster roll, and the right stuff to stand proud on its own. In , The Daily Meal shared a photo of the original McDonald's menu from the s, when the restaurant chain was in its infancy.

There weren't any piece boxes of McNuggets, the Filet-O-Fish was nowhere to be found, and the Sausage McGriddle didn't exist on even an imaginary level yet. Over sixty years ago, a trip to McDonald's meant you could get a hamburger, you could get a cheeseburger, or you could get an order of "Golden French Fries" for a dime, making the now-legendary McDonald's fry one of the original menu items.

Actually, fries at McDonald's go back even farther than that, all the way to the company's origins as a barbecue restaurant , when the McDonald's brothers focused on ribs and pork sandwiches. Even then, fries were a staple offering for the restaurant.

And here's the thing: When you devote yourself to doing one thing for almost 80 years, whether that's riding a unicycle, speaking Mandarin Chinese, or playing Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, you get really, really good at it. McDonald's owes some of the perfection of its signature creation to one thing: Lots and lots of practice. While the food scientists at McDonald's are constantly trying to innovate and overhaul their menu, it's their classic items that tend to sell the best , accounting for more than 75 percent of overall sales.

And there's no item in the classic McDonald's lineup more popular than the french fry. In fact, the company sells approximately 9 million pounds worldwide, each and every single day.

This makes McDonald's the number one purchaser of potatoes in the United States, where the company buys 3.

How does this insane volume contribute to the overall deliciousness of McDonald's french fries? It all comes down to turnover. Because the McDonald's corporation sells 6, pounds of french fries every single minute assuming they were slinging fries 24 hours a day , the chances are high that when you cruise into your local franchise location at noon on a Saturday, fresh batches of the chain's spuds are being cooked up and sent out as quickly as the speed of the fryers will allow, ensuring that your order hasn't had a chance to sit around too long.

Because french fries are one of the few menu items that nearly every customer orders, there's almost always a fresh batch on the way. Is there a single menu item at McDonald's that suffers more, in terms of deliciousness, in the brief window between when they're pulled from the fryer and when they hit your mouth?

What starts as a cardboard container representing the pinnacle of mankind's achievement in the fast food realm quickly turns into a mushy, mealy, limp pile of garbage in mere minutes. McDonald's claims that after the fries get pulled from the fryer, they are held on warming tables for just seven minutes, before they are discarded and a new batch gets fried.