Tag: reverse engineering

Reverse engineering the perfect hot chip

It’s only three weeks until I can once again enjoy the bountiful wonders of McDonalds and its fast food counterparts. My new financial year resolution for 2009/10 was to give up fast food and soft drink. It’s a shame I didn’t hear about this sooner… this food blogger will go down in history as the man who reverse engineered McDonald’s fries so that you can enjoy them at home… add this to your own homemade KFC with 11 reverse engineered herbs and spices, and you’ve got the perfect meal to enjoy with the World Cup in the early hours of the morning.

In a ground breaking piece of research he managed to get hold of a batch of frozen fries (through some vicarious deception) to put them through the rigours of scientific investigation.

He started with the following parameters for the perfect batch of fries, lets call them “the golden rules”:

  1. The exterior must be very crisp, but not tough.
  2. The interior must be intact, fluffy, and have a strong potato flavor.
  3. The fry must be an even, light golden blond
  4. The fry must stay crisp and tasty for at least as long as it takes to eat a full serving.

Here’s how he secured the frozen fries. He had a friend on Facebook create a scavenger hunt with frozen fries as a required element. Genius.

He measured them:

They’re precisely a quarter of an inch thick.

He fried them in regular peanut oil (and saw that they were good)…

So concluded that the mystery was in the method of potato preparation. He goes into the science quite extensively, examining the changes in potato structure at every turn (McDonald’s fries are blanched, pre-fried, and frozen again). Then he stumbled on to a brilliant addition to the McDonalds method, perfect for home chefs… putting vinegar in the water used to blanch the potatos.

He claims the proof of the potato is in the eating, but here’s the recipe