French fries, or simply fries, also known as chips, and finger chips (Indian English),[Indian English, ] are batonnet or Julienning-cut[Taihua Mu, Hongnan Sun, Xingli Liu, Potato Staple Food Processing Technology, p. 14, Springer, 2016 .] deep frying of disputed origin. They are prepared by cutting potatoes into even strips, drying them, and frying them, usually in a deep fryer. Pre-cut, blanched, and frozen are widely used, and sometimes baked in a regular or convection oven, such as an air fryer.
French fries are served hot, either soft or crispy, and are generally eaten as part of lunch or dinner or by themselves as a snack, and they commonly appear on the menus of , fast food restaurants, pubs, and bars. They are typically salted and may be served with ketchup, vinegar, mayonnaise, tomato sauce, or other sauces. Fries can be topped more heavily, as in the dishes of poutine, loaded fries or chili cheese fries, and are occasionally made from instead of potatoes.
Preparation
The standard method for cooking french fries is
deep frying, which submerges them in hot fat, nowadays most commonly oil.
produce potato chips with lower oil content, while maintaining their colour and texture.
The potatoes are prepared by first cutting them (peeled or unpeeled) into even strips, which are then wiped off or soaked in cold water to remove the surface starch, and thoroughly dried.[Fannie Farmer, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, 1896, s.v.] They may then be fried in one or two stages. Chefs generally agree that the two-bath technique produces better results.
In the two-stage or two-bath method, the first bath, sometimes called blanching, is in hot fat (around 160 °C/320 °F) to cook the fries through. This step can be done in advance.
Since the 1960s, most french fries in the US have been produced from frozen Russet potatoes which have been blanched or at least air-dried industrially.[Eric Schlosser (2001). Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of All-American Meal. Houghton Mifflin. ]
Chemical and physical changes
French fries are fried in a two-step process: the first time is to cook the starch throughout the entire cut at low heat, and the second time is to create the golden crispy exterior of the fry at a higher temperature. This is necessary because if the potato cuts are only fried once, the temperature would either be too hot, causing only the exterior to be cooked and not the inside, or not hot enough where the entire fry is cooked, but its crispy exterior will not develop. Although the potato cuts may be baked or steamed as a preparation method, this section will only focus on french fries made using frying oil. During the initial frying process (approximately 150 °C), water on the surface of the cuts evaporates off the surface and the water inside the cuts gets absorbed by the starch granules, causing them to swell and produce the fluffy interior of the fry.
The starch granules are able to retain the water and expand due to gelatinisation. The water and heat break the glycosidic linkages between amylopectin and amylose strands, allowing a new gel matrix to form via hydrogen bonds which aid in water retention. The moisture that gets trapped within the gel matrix is responsible for the fluffy interior of the fry. The gelatinised starch molecules move towards the surface of the fries "forming a thick layer of gelatinised starch" and this layer of pre-gelatinised starch becomes the crisp exterior after the potato cuts are fried for a second time.
Name and etymology
In the United States and most of Canada, the term
french fries, sometimes capitalised as
French fries, or shortened to
fries, refers to all dishes of fried elongated pieces of potatoes. in shape and size may have names such as
curly fries,
shoestring fries, etc.
In the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, Ireland and New Zealand, the term chips is generally used, being a popular dish in most Commonwealth countries. However, the term french fries or skinny fries is used for thinly cut fried potatoes which are different from the more traditional thick cut chips.
In the US or Canada these more thickly-cut chips might be called steak fries, depending on the shape, while the word chips is more often used in North America to refer to , commonly known in the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, and South Africa as crisps. In Australia, chips are often referred to as hot chips to distinguish them from , although the type of 'chip' is often implied through context.
Thomas Jefferson had "potatoes served in the French manner" at a White House dinner in 1802.[
] The expression "french fried potatoes" first occurred in print in English in the 1856 work Cookery for Maids of All Work by Eliza Warren: "French Fried Potatoes. – Cut new potatoes in thin slices, put them in boiling fat, and a little salt; fry both sides of a light golden brown colour; drain."[ Home: Oxford English Dictionary . Oed.com. Retrieved 12 September 2012.] This account referred to thin, shallow-fried slices of potato. It is not clear where or when the now familiar deep-fried batons or fingers of potato were first prepared. In the early 20th century, the term "french fried" was being used in the sense of "deep-fried" for foods like or chicken.
One story about the name "french fries" claims that when the American Expeditionary Forces arrived in Belgium during World War I, they assumed that chips were a French dish because French was spoken in the Belgian Army.[Google ngrams for "French fried potatoes" and "French fries" in the US and UK corpora [2]] The term was in use in the United States as early as 1886.[Handy, Mrs. Moses P. "Kitchen Economy in France", Good Housekeeping, Volumes 28–29 159 Vol XXIX No 1 July 1899 Whole No 249. Retrieved 16 November 2014.]
Origin
Chile
The oldest documents where a fried potato is mentioned are from Chile in 1629 in the city of Nacimiento, extracted from
Happy Captivity, written in 1673 by Chilean Francisco Núñez de Pineda, where he narrates his experiences as a captive war soldier in 1629 at the hands of
Mapuche warriors.
In the text, he mentioned eating "papas fritas" (fried potatoes) in 1629 and women "sent fried and stewed potatoes" to the chiefs.
Spain
French fries as we know them may have been invented in Spain, the first European country in which the potato appeared from the New World colony.
Belgian–French dispute
The Belgians and French have an ongoing dispute about where fries were invented.
The Belgian food historian Pierre Leclercq has traced the history of the french fry and asserts that "it is clear that fries are of French origin".
From the Belgian standpoint, the popularity of the term "french fries" is explained as "French gastronomic hegemony" into which the cuisine of Belgium was assimilated, because of a lack of understanding coupled with a shared language and geographic proximity of the countries.[ Hugues Henry (16 August 2001) . Frites.be. Retrieved 12 September 2012.][Leclercq, Pierre (2 February 2010). La véritable histoire de la pomme de terre frite , Musee-gourmandise.be, mentioning the work of Fernand Pirotte on the history of the potato]
Global use
Belgium
Fries are very popular in Belgium, where they are known as frieten (in Flemish) or frites (in Belgian French), and the Netherlands, where among the working classes they are known as patat in the north and, in the south, friet(en).[See this map indicating where patat/friet/frieten is used in the Low Countries] In Belgium, fries are sold in shops called Friterie]] (French), frietkot/frituur (Flemish), snackbar (Dutch in The Netherlands) or Fritüre/Frittüre (German). They are served with Belgian sauces and eaten either on their own or with other snacks. Traditionally fries are served in a cornet de frites (French), patatzak/frietzak/fritzak (Dutch/Flemish), or Frittentüte (German), a white cardboard cone, then wrapped in paper, with a spoonful of sauce (often mayonnaise) on top.
France
In France and other French-speaking countries, fried potatoes are formally pommes de terre frites, but more commonly pommes frites ("fried apples"), patates frites, or simply frites. The words aiguillettes ("needle-ettes") or allumettes ("matchsticks") are used when the french fries are very small and thin. One enduring origin story holds that french fries were invented by street vendors on the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris in 1789, just before the outbreak of the French Revolution.
Germany
French fries migrated to the German-speaking countries during the 19th century. In Germany, they are usually known by the French words pommes frites, or only Pommes or Fritten (derived from the French words, but pronounced as German words).[ "Erste Runde – Pommes frites", Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache (AdA), Phil.-Hist. Fakultät, Universität Augsburg, 10. November 2005] Often served with ketchup or mayonnaise, they are popular as a side dish in restaurants, or as a street-food snack purchased at an Imbissstand (food stand). Since the 1950s, currywurst has become a widely-popular dish that is commonly offered with fries. Currywurst is a sausage (often bratwurst or bockwurst) in a spiced ketchup-based sauce, dusted with curry powder and served with fries.
United Kingdom
The standard deep-fried cut potatoes in the United Kingdom are called chips, and are cut into pieces between thick. They are occasionally made from unpeeled potatoes (skins showing). British chips are not the same thing as (an American term); those are called "crisps" in the UK and some other countries. In the UK, chips are part of the popular, and now international, fast food dish fish and chips. In the UK, the name chips are a separate item to french fries; with chips being more thickly cut than french fries, they can be cooked once or multiple times at different temperatures.[Alan Davidson, The Oxford Companion to Food, p. 180, Oxford University Press, 2014 .][Brian Yarvin, The Ploughman's Lunch and the Miser's Feast, p. 83, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012 .][Ude, Louis (1822) . J. Ebers] By the late 1850s, at least one cookbook refers to "French Fried Potatoes".
The first commercially available chips in the UK were sold by Mrs 'Granny' Duce in one of the West Riding towns in 1854.[Chaloner, W. H.; Henderson, W. O. (1990). Industry and Innovation: Selected Essays. Taylor & Francis .] A blue plaque in Oldham marks the origin of the fish-and-chip shop, and thus the start of the fast food industry in Britain.[. Lovechips.co.uk. 27 February 2011] Although chips were a popular dish in most Commonwealth countries, the "thin style" french fries have been popularised worldwide in large part by the large American fast food chains such as McDonald's and Burger King.
Netherlands
"Pommes frites" or just "frites" (French), " frieten" (a word used in Flanders and the southern provinces of the Netherlands) or " patat" (used in the north and central parts of the Netherlands) became a national snack.
United States
In the United States, the Simplot is credited with successfully commercialising french fries in frozen form during the 1940s. Subsequently, in 1967, Ray Kroc of McDonald's contracted the Simplot company to supply them with frozen fries, replacing fresh-cut potatoes. In 2004, 29% of the United States' potato crop was used to make frozen fries; 90% consumed by the food services sector and 10% by retail.
New Brunswick
The town of Florenceville-Bristol, New Brunswick in Canada, headquarters of McCain Foods, calls itself "the French fry capital of the world" and also hosts a museum about potatoes called Potato World.[ N.B. museum celebrates the humble spud | The Chronicle Herald. Thechronicleherald.ca (19 September 2014). Retrieved on 13 November 2016.] McCain Foods is the world's largest manufacturer of frozen french fries and other potato specialities.
Québec
French fries are the main ingredient in the Québécois dish known as poutine, a dish consisting of fried potatoes covered with and brown gravy. Poutine has a growing number of variations, but it is generally considered to have been developed in rural Québec sometime in the 1950s, although precisely where in the province it first appeared is a matter of contention.[ Article on Poutine coming to New York City]
Spain
In Spain, fried potatoes are called patatas fritas or papas fritas. Another common form, involving larger irregular cuts, is patatas bravas. The potatoes are cut into big chunks, partially boiled and then fried. They are usually seasoned with a spicy tomato sauce.
South Africa
Whilst eating 'regular' crispy french fries is common in South Africa, a regional favourite, particularly in Cape Town, is a soft soggy version doused in white vinegar called "slap-chips" (pronounced " slup-chips" in English or " slaptjips" in Afrikaans).
Japan
Furaido poteto is a standard fast-food side dish in Japan.
Variants
French fries come in multiple variations and toppings. Some examples include:
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Carne asada fries – fries covered with carne asada, guacamole, sour cream and cheese.
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Cheese fries – fries covered with cheese.
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Chili cheese fries – fries covered with chili and cheese.
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Crinkle-cut fries – also known as "wavy fries", these are cut in a corrugated, ridged fashion.
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Curly fries – characterised by their Helix, cut from whole potatoes using a specialised spiral slicer.
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Curry chips – fries covered in curry sauce.
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Dirty fries – fries covered in melted cheese with various toppings such as bacon, pulled pork, chili or gravy.
[Kirwin, Ellen: Liverpool's best dirty fries, cheesy chips and downright filthy food , Liverpool Echo 8 March 2017. Accessed on 13 May 2021.]
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French fry sandwich
[ The U.S. Open is selling a delicious sandwich with french fries on it | For The Win . Ftw.usatoday.com (17 June 2016). Retrieved on 13 November 2016.] – fried potato with bread, including the chip butty, horseshoe sandwich, french tacos, and the mitraillette.
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Greek fries – fries topped with feta cheese and various toppings such as tomatoes, red onions, and tzatziki.
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Kimchi fries – fries topped with caramelised baechu-kimchi and green onions
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Loaded fries – fries topped with cheese and bacon.
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Microwave fries – fries that are cooked in the microwave; some frozen fries have instructions for microwaving.
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Oven fries – fries that are cooked in the oven as a final step in the preparation.
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Potato wedges – thick-cut, elongated wedge-shaped fries with the skin left on.
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Poutine – a dish consisting of fries topped with cheese curds and gravy and principally associated with the Canadian province of Québec.
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Salt and pepper chips, 3-in-1 chips, and the Spice bag – various British Chinese fusion and Irish Chinese fusion dishes.
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Shoestring fries – thin-cut fries.
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Steak fries – thick-cut fries.
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Sweet potato fries – fries made with sweet potatoes instead of traditional white potatoes.
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Tornado fries – Helix-cut potatoes that are placed on a skewer and then deep fried.
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Triple-cooked chips – fries that are simmered, cooled and drained using a Sous-vide cooking technique; they are then deep fried at just 130 °C, cooled and finally deep fried at 180 °C.
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Waffle fries – lattice-shaped fries obtained by quarter-turning the potato before each next slide over a grater and deep-frying just once.
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A baked variant, oven fries, uses less or no oil.
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Garlic fries, a variant that includes garlic and parsley.
File:Air-fried French Fries.jpg|Air-fried fries
File:Chili fries.jpg|Chili fries
File:The Hat, chili cheese fries.jpg|Chili cheese fries
File:Pommes VI (20006982466).jpg|Crinkle-cut fries
File:Fast food 01 ebru.jpg|Curly fries
File:Curry chips.jpg|Curry chips
File:Dirty fries at Stone's.jpg|Dirty fries
File:Shoestring fries, garlic, homemade blue cheese dressing, with some spicy sauce.jpg|Shoestring fries with blue cheese dressing
File:Sweet Potato Fries.jpg|Sweet potato fries
File:ChickFilA-Fries.jpg|Waffle fries
Accompaniments
Fries tend to be served with a variety of accompaniments, such as salt and vinegar (malt, balsamic or white), pepper, Cajun seasoning, grated cheese, melted cheese, mushy peas, heated curry sauce, curry ketchup, hot sauce, relish, mustard, mayonnaise, bearnaise sauce, tartar sauce, chili, tzatziki, feta, garlic sauce, fry sauce, butter, sour cream, ranch dressing, barbecue sauce, gravy, honey, aioli, Steak sauce, ketchup, lemon juice, piccalilli, pickled cucumber, pickled , or .[ List of accompaniments to french fries – Unlikely Words – A blog of Boston, Providence, and the world . Unlikely Words (7 November 2011). Retrieved 12 September 2012.] In Australia, a popular flavouring added to chips is chicken salt.
Nutrition
French fries primarily contain (mostly in the form of starch) and protein from the potato, and fat absorbed during the deep-frying process. Salt, which contains sodium, is almost always applied as a surface seasoning. For example, a large serving of french fries at McDonald's in the United States is 154 grams and includes 350 mg of sodium. The 510 food energy come from 66 g of carbohydrates, 24 g of fat and 7 g of protein.
A number of experts have criticised french fries for being very unhealthy. According to Jonathan Bonnet in a Time magazine article, "fries are nutritionally unrecognizable from a spud" because they "involve frying, salting, and removing one of the healthiest parts of the potato: the skin, where many of the nutrients and fiber are found."[ "Fried Potatoes and Acrylamide: Are French Fries Bad For You?" . Time. 11 June 2015. Retrieved 13 November 2016.] Kristin Kirkpatrick calls french fries "an extremely starchy vegetable dipped in a fryer that then loads on the unhealthy fat, and what you have left is a food that has no nutritional redeeming value in it at all."
Frying french fries in tallow, lard, or other animal fats adds saturated fat to them. Replacing animal fats with tropical vegetable oils, such as palm oil, simply substitutes one saturated fat for another. For many years partially hydrogenated vegetable oils were used as a means of avoiding cholesterol and reducing saturated fatty acid content, but in time the trans fat content of these oils was perceived as contributing to cardiovascular disease.
French fries contain some of the highest levels of acrylamides of any foodstuff, and experts have raised concerns about the effects of acrylamides on human health.
In April 2023, researchers from China suggested a possible link between the consumption of fried food and mental health problems. According to the study, those who frequently consume fried food, especially potatoes, have an increased risk of depression and anxiety, by 7% and 12% respectively, compared to those who do not. The connection was particularly prominent among younger males. However, the causal relationship is not conclusive. The results are still preliminary, and the researchers are uncertain whether consuming fried foods causes mental health problems or individuals with symptoms of anxiety and depression tend to opt for fried foods.
Legal issues
In June 2004, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), with the advisement of a federal district judge from Beaumont, Texas, classified batter-coated french fries as a vegetable under the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act. This was primarily for trade reasons; french fries do not meet the standard to be listed as a processed food.
Environmental impact
A 2022 study estimated the environmental impact of 57,000 food products in the UK and Ireland, finding that french fries have a lower impact on the environment than many other foods.
See also
Bibliography
External links
