The frozen French fry serves a valuable purpose

Let’s start the foodie component of your weekend with three quiz questions.

One: name a popular dish that is usually much better at fast food places than at expensive restaurants?

 

Two: which is the Gujarati vegetable you are most likely to consume when you eat out? And three: What does all of this have to do with “the global ubiquity of a giant chain of restaurants hosted by a creepy clown?”

 

   The last question may be a bit of a giveaway. Because the dish in question is French Fries and so, no prizes for guessing who the creepy clown is.

 

   Yes, French Fries are usually better at restaurants hosted by the afore-mentioned clown than at more expensive places. As for question two: a large proportion of the French Fries you consume when you eat out are made from potatoes that were first grown in Gujarat and continue to be grown there. That’s how it may be your favourite Gujarati vegetable even if you don’t realise it.

 

   And three: All of this does have something to do with McDonald’s but you will have to keep reading to get to the bit where I explain the connection.

 

   The quote about the creepy clown, by the way, is from Ben Shewry, perhaps Australia’s greatest chef and the owner of the Attica restaurant in Melbourne. Shewry is passionate about French Fries though, like most Australians (and Brits) he calls them ‘chips’.

 

   Shewry says: “In Australia hardly any restaurants make their own chips. I’m not talking about fast food joints, but actual reservation-only fancy restaurants. Most restaurant chips are manufactured by one of three enormous North American companies.”

 

   He is right. The same is true of India and most other countries. But, Shewry adds “most fast food chains have more advanced, expensive deep fryers and chip cooking-systems than serious restaurants, which means that their execution of the same frozen chip is indisputably better. It is a f:…ing con.”

 

   Okay, before we get carried away with Shewry’s colourful Australian vocabulary, let me offer some details.

 

   The North American companies he refers to sell frozen Fries all over the world. (In some countries they have local imitators who try and create a similar product at lower prices.) Most restaurants buy huge catering-packs of these fries and dump the contents in their deep-fat fryers. Of course, the fast food guys, whose businesses are driven by selling French Fries do it much better than fancy restaurants where the Fries are just one of the many items on the menu.

 

   Why do expensive restaurants take the easy way out? Well, there are two reasons: laziness and pragmatism.

 

   Contrary to what you may think, making a French fry is immensely complicated. You need the right kind of potato with a low water content and less sugar. We don’t usually realise this but most potatoes are harvested seasonally and all potatoes begin to deteriorate the moment they are picked. So it is not easy to constantly source the right potatoes all around the year. Plus, until recently, the potatoes sold in India were totally unsuited to making French fries.

 

   That’s the practical/pragmatic reason for the popularity of frozen French Fries in kitchens.

 

   But there is also the other reason: greed and apathy. Even in countries (like Australia) where you get the right potato, it is easier and cheaper to buy frozen fries. And of course if you are a fancy restaurant you can charge four times what the fast food chains charge even though you are selling exactly the same French Fry.

 

   Enter the creepy clown.

 

   When McDonald’s first came to India, they imported frozen French Fries from McCain, the Canadian company that meets their potato requirements worldwide. But as McDonald’s expanded, it made sense to go local. It asked McCain to source Indian potatoes.

 

"But, I hear you ask, given that the right potatoes are now available, why do fancy restaurants and five star hotels in India still rely on frozen Fries?"

   As we could’ve told them, the potatoes grown in India were always wrong for French Fries. When it discovered this, McCain tried planting American potato varieties in India. The russet, a breed favoured for Fries in the US, failed to grow well in Indian farms. Nor did Maris Piper, a variety that the Brits love.

 

   McCain’s scientists then came up with new breeds that suited our conditions. McCain built a frozen potato factory in Mehsana in Gujarat and it contracted Gujarat’s farmers to plant the new potato varieties.

 

   In the process, it created an entire industry and a new agricultural sector. Local firms quickly set up their own plants in the area and farmers all over the neighbouring Banaskantha district also began growing the new breeds of potatoes. Suddenly India went from having no potatoes that were suitable for French Fries to becoming an exporter of potatoes that were specifically grown for French Fries.

 

   All thanks to the creepy clown.

 

   But, I hear you ask, given that the right potatoes are now available, why do fancy restaurants and five star hotels in India still rely on frozen Fries?

 

   Well, as we have seen, making them from scratch seems like too much trouble. It was never just a question of finding the right potatoes. Even if you buy the new breeds, you still have to cut them by hand into the right shapes, rinse them again and again to get rid of the starch and then fry them. But even that’s not enough. You also need to fry them twice: once to cook the insides and then once again to make the outsides crisp.

 

   Once the fries are ready, they will start to get soggy in about 10 minutes. If you are sure that you can have the fries picked up from the kitchen and served on the table immediately, you can certainly hand-cut and cook them twice. But restaurants are never really sure about things like that.

 

   Moreover even if you can manage this, what happens to delivery? Freshly cut Fries will get soggy long before they reach their destination. If you use frozen Fries then you don’t have to worry about any of this. You don’t even have to cook them twice. Because frozen French fries are not really raw. They have already been de-starched and par-fried at the factory before they were packed. (The par-frying prevents the potatoes from deteriorating. Once a potato is cooked the deterioration is arrested.) You can put the frozen Fries directly into the fryer for just a single frying. Nor will they get soggy as quickly. Manufacturers coat the Fries with what they say is a mixture of potato extract and tapioca to keep them crisp. (It is often alleged that chemicals are also used.)

 

   Given all this, why would a restaurant bother with cooking Fries from scratch?

 

   There’s a second reason too. I spoke to Aakriti Malhotra who runs Aku’s, home of Delhi‘s best artisanal burger. Malhotra trained at Bar Boulud in New York and was taught that French Fries must always be hand cut. That’s how she started out at Aku’s. But as her business grew (there are now five outlets and more are on the way), she found it difficult to source good potatoes. The best potatoes, she discovered, were certainly grown in India but they were exported. Or they were sold to the frozen Fry factories. Only the potatoes that were not good enough for these purposes hit the local market. Often even those potatoes were simply not available. Eventually, Akriti gave up the battle and chose frozen potatoes for their consistency.

 

   This is the experience of many well intentioned chefs especially if they need to make lots of French fries. Vanshika Bhatia learnt to make French Fries (or pomme frites as she was told to call them) at the Cordon Bleu school in London. At her Petitte Pie Shop in Gurgaon, she still buys what are called Pahadi potatoes, hand cuts and double cooks them. She is honest enough to admit that she can do this because the quantum of French Fries at a pie shop is not as huge as the larger quantities you would require at a burger restaurant. And even now, she does not send her fries out with her delivery orders because they can get soggy.

 

   So yes, I agree with Ben Shewry that expensive restaurants should try harder. It is a rip off to charge fancy prices for the same product that fast food places sell for much less.

 

   But for most non-fancy places, I have to concede that the frozen French Fry serves a valuable purpose. It delivers consistency and you don’t need to be a genius (or a cook even) to figure out how to empty a pack into a deep-fat fryer

 

   In the end, the creepy clown won.