Original subtitles

(playful music)

[Announcer] Here they are.

Perfect french fries. Delicious.

One of the most popular, most profitable foods

in American restaurants.

And who makes these perfect profit makers?

Thousands of fry chefs in all

types of restaurants serving all types of people.

Fry chefs just like you.

And to help you make the best french fries possible,

the Frozen Potato Products Institute has made this film.

(light whistling music)

**

(upbeat music)

[Malcolm] If you go into a fast food place and you observe

kids, very, very young kids.

The thing that they're clearly drawn to is the fries.

(upbeat playful music)

They have this food which they can manage and control

and that they can douse in ketchup.

And the whole thing is just like,

it's like they're in heaven.

And on top of that,

these things are crispy on the outside and like

soft and lovely and warm on the inside.

And it's just like, you know,

they're so intensely satisfied with that experience.

I just think there are certain things that are imprinted

on your soul and fries are one of those things.

(woman laughing)

[All] Fries!

- Oh, we love. - I love the fries!

- I love fries. (laughs)

- They're the most delicious thing I've ever tasted.

- Who doesn't like fries? It's not possible, you know?

- Mmmmm!

(laughter)

[Lucas] Oh, it's just like bliss.

It's just like pure like endorphins in your brain.

- French fries are a communal food.

It's a vehicle for love and friendship and community.

- Fry it up and crispy deliciousness.

[Scott] Is it French?

Is it South American? Is a Korean?

Something like fries that can be unique to all those places.

I think it's something that connects us all.

[Dave] They're always delicious.

They're always welcome.

I wouldn't want to be in a fry-less world.

Thank God for potatoes.

(light upbeat music)

(techno music)

[Harold] Oh, hello.

I didn't see you there.

Let's talk about some French fried potatoes.

A French fry is essentially a Parallelepiped

of potato, that is to say,

a stick that has been cooked in such a way that it's creamy

on the inside and crisp and crunchy on the outside.

And the way that happens is by boiling the water

on the inside of the French fry to make it nice and creamy

and boiling off the water on the outside of the

French fry, replacing it with

oil to make it crisp and crunchy.

A French fry is determined largely by the behavior

of starch. And starch is a molecule that's made up

of lots of little sugar molecules joined together.

Sugar molecules are the enemy of a good French fry because

they tend to brown very easily.

The thing about a French fry is that you don't want it

to brown until you've already created the crust.

My feeling is that science

doesn't do a very good job of explaining

the deliciousness of pretty much anything.

But I've got my theories.

It's a combination of textures and flavors.

It's got a little potato flavor.

It's got a little oil flavor.

All those things are in there,

but they're delicate enough that they don't overwhelm you.

So that you say, hmm, that was nice.

I want another. And another.

And another. And another.

And another. And another.

And another. And another.

(oil crackling)

[Malcolm] Cooking and immersing

something in animal fat, we've probably been doing this

for as long as we've been cooking.

Many, many culinary cultures

in the world have a version of the French fry.

So there is something I think universal about the crunch.

The nature of that crunch is, I think,

something that all of us are drawn to in some way.

What particularly, I mean, other than the fact that it's

delicious, is there some other thing that satisfies?

I have no idea, but maybe it's just

the extraordinary contrast between those two states,

between the outside and the inside.

For some reason that just continually draws us in.

(indistinct chatter)

(light music)

**

(oil crackling)

(whimsical music)

[Scott] These Russet Burbanks. These are a longer potato.

That makes them perfect for a longer French fries,

which people have come to expect.

They've got a high starch content which allows them

to stay fluffy when they're cooked at high heat.

And not get too soggy or kind of melty on the inside.

(oil crackling)

And a Russet Burbank certainly delivers on expectation.

But what might a potato look

like that exceeds expectations?

I think that's an interesting question

and perhaps not an experiment for the kitchens of Balthazar,

but perhaps an experiment for us.

(light upbeat music)

A couple of years ago, I got into the ketchup business.

And now selling millions of bottles of ketchup a year,

we have always found ourselves close to French fries.

We thought a great way to honor the fry,

was to create an exhibit.

So we asked a hundred

different restaurants in New York to loan us one

of their fries, which we encased in a thin

layer of resin, put in a glass specimen jar,

and for a few days we took a gallery space on Bowery

and turned it into Fries of New York.

We actually had an outpouring of press.

We had thousands of people come to the show.

It was, I think, at that moment where we

realized, wow, fries are really powerful.

People have passion for fries that really rested this

this dream in our head of creating a fry that could

stand up to any of those hundred fries.

But we don't really want to start a restaurant.

Everything we do goes through grocery stores.

And when you think about

that frozen aisle of the supermarket and those

doors with French fries behind them,

it's almost this glowing promise that you look upon

them and magically it's the possibility of being able

to make a restaurant quality fry at home.

That is, I think, the Holy Grail.

Right? That's the gold standard.

(oil crackling)

I think fulfilling that mission is going to be

incredibly hard. Fries are basically

the easiest thing to order and the hardest thing to make.

So what I'd love to do is start

actually just by tasting these.

And let's talk about what

we're tasting and see if we can kind of get an interesting

perspective on the fry that way.

- As I go fry by fry?

- Let's go fry by fry.

(upbeat music)

- Great full body crisp.

[Scott] So crispiness.

- How do you like the chewiness inside?

- Pretty lacking, but I can't tell if that's maybe stale.

- So it feels oily,

it feels it feels maybe over fired,

which I think detracts from the complexity of the savoriness.

- Yeah.

**

[Scott] I love a good waffle fry.

So let's go waffle.

- What I appreciated about this fry

is the fluffiness in the inside and the texture of it.

I think it kind of holds up nicely over time.

**

- So I'm a personal fan

of the crinkle cut because you get all that extra

nooks and crannies. You look skeptical.

- I feel like I have to overcome

childhood PTSD from like the meals at school.

- But there's something about it that's just easy.

[Scott] Yeah.

And it proclaims, here I am and I'm an outsider.

All right. Final one.

- The last ones? - Yeah.

Fascinating.

- I think we all tasted the same thing

because if I ate these

at that restaurant, I'd be like, oh, French fries.

I mean, now I'm like, oh, McDonald's.

- Well, yeah.

**

[Scott] This is, as it is,

a gigantic operational challenge for us.

We're trying to do something that we've never done before.

I think also it's worth

pausing for a moment to recognize it's hard.

French fries are hard.

It's hard to deliver a good fry, you know?

(whspering) Fries!

[Dave] You can't ever really think

about French fries too much.

Any simple thing.

The thing that seems simple, right?

Is very hard to get exactly the way you want it.

**

I believe that frying is God's cooking technique.

It's amazing how many different ways there are

to tweak it and to get it just right.

Years ago, I started trying

to investigate all of the different variables.

So I read every

scholarly work that there was on French fries.

Effects of blanching conditions on the mechanical

properties of French fry strips.

Processing conditions, influencing the physical

properties of French fried potatoes.

Effective moisture content on standardization

of the distribution of oil, a structure and texture

properties, of changes of polysaccharide content

and texture of potato during French fry production.

This is all, by the way, scintillating reading.

(upbeat music)

It's about the miracle of moisture management.

The outside of it,

when we fry it is going to have to be really crunchy.

The enemy of crunch is, of course, moisture and steam.

The moisture on the inside of the potato will instantly

steam out and ruin that crust and make it soggy.

So it's all a game.

And the bigger the French fry is,

the more difficult it is to maintain a balance between

a very nice crust on the outside and a very nice

baked potato kind of texture on the inside.

**

So the main difference between these two batches is just

the size, half inch and three eighths.

(oil crackling)

That's frying fast. This is some hot, hot oil.

Oh, look at that. Look at that.

Perfect, there's almost no pull away from the crust.

You've got full internal potato.

Now, these guys are going

to stay crunchy from now until I'm put into the ground.

**

Both of these were treated exactly the same.

Only difference is this one I

put into the freezer and this one just went into the fridge.

Oh, hot--

Hot! Hmm!

This is actually pretty good. I have to say.

I must say, it is good.

**

This one is just my normal blanching.

These ones here, I put them on a rack in the oven

for a little bit to flash off more moisture.

These last ones, I steamed these.

My theory is that the inside

of this French fry will be nice.

And it is. Huh? Huh? Theory.

(upbeat music)

I like a certain kind of French fry, I like a French fry

that's between about three eighths of an inch and about

half of an inch. Anything smaller than that,

once you get down to quarter

inch and shoestring, it becomes all about the crust.

There's very little inside anyway.

You know, look, you make what you like.

If you like the steak fry, go buy a steak fry.

I'm just saying what I think like I think like between this

and this is where French Fry Nirvana lives.

(upbeat music)

(oil crackling)

[Malcolm] A bad French fry is in a front

and should be avoided at all costs.

A fry that's soggy is not-- is gross.

It's not actually, it's not

like a lesser version of a proper fry.

It's actually a different food

that does not check any of the French fry boxes.

And there are so many other starches out there.

There's a bunch of good alternatives.

They're not the only

player out there. But the good French fry is

sublime, and if we accept bad French fries,

then I think that we reduce the incentive of

french fry purveyors to insist on excellence.

(upbeat music) (typing sound)

(bell rings) (cheering)

[Lucas] Hello, my name is Lucas Peterson

and I'm a food columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

I first started doing like

Matrix based food rankings about four or five years ago.

The idea is that, like as a country,

we're really obsessed with like putting things

in order and ranking things if it's like colleges or if it's

our sports teams or whatever it is.

And so the idea that you could do that to something as

subjective as food was just supposed to be kind of funny.

I wanted to rank fries because they have a place within our

culture that I think few other foods do.

**

I went to every major fast food chain I could think of,

and I ate so many fries and then I wrote what I thought.

Good taste is this way.

A good texture is this way.

Five Guys is up here.

McDonald's is around here.

I think Wendy's was OK.

Chick-Fil-A was OK.

And then down way

at the bottom, you have like Jollibee,

you have In-N-Out at the lower corner.

**

People were very mad.

The people who are upset were primarily upset

because I said In-N-Out's fries were really bad.

When I looked at some of the responses,

it was like, you don't know Jack about fries.

In-N-Out is the shit. For exclamation points.

Dumbest article to take up

space on my phone. Is this writer in high school?

This post has been referred

for review by the un-American Activities Committee.

This is why we need a wall

to keep people who don't like In-And-Out of the country.

Yes, this is totally absurd.

But people have a really close relationship to

like the foods that they first eat in their lives.

Just like things that you remember when you're

in the back seat of your parent's car and you go

through the drive thru and whatever that happened

to be, you develop like a very strong attachment,

an irrational attachment to it.

So to attack

the hallowed ground of like what some people associate

very deeply with, like safety and like warmth

that really like fucked some people up.

(dramatic music)

(explosion)

- Oh, that doesn't, no.

- That's good, good question.

- That's good question, but no.

- I think they are from Belgium.

Yeah. So, uh, and I think

the potatoes, they come from I believe from Turkey.

- Umm, I have no idea, honestly, but they're good.

That's all I know.

- Somewhere in Europe. - Yeah.

(laughs)

- You have to look in the books to see, to shop for it.

**

[Charles] Well, the history of French fries,

it is complex because much of the history of French fries

is lost in time and space.

It's not recorded.

It's not a historical event.

Most of the time.

So we have these occasional references.

But for all we know, French fries might have been

prepared thousands of years ago.

(playful music)

The potato began in the mountains of Peru,

as best we know. The Spanish conquistadors

brought the potato back to Europe and a fellow named

Pedro de Leon in in 1533, discovered that potatoes were

better for preventing scurvy than limes and began to carry

them regularly back on his ships to Spain.

And began to be cultivated there.

And the Spanish conquered the part of Belgium in 1514

that became known as the Spanish Netherlands.

Belgium farmers began

to realize that potatoes were an efficient crop for them.

So the potato flourished in Belgium.

French fries began in the Meuse Valley,

as best we know. Villagers noticed the river

had frozen over and they couldn't get to their

favorite little sardine fish that they liked to fry.

And the women took pity on them and began to cut

potatoes in the shape of small fish and fry them up for them.

- They're Belgian frites.

And obviously everybody in the world knows about it.

Belgian frites are the best because it's part and parcel

of everybody's life in Belgium.

You can't get away without them, without fries.

- In Belgium, we're quite sad

when we hear French fries because it hurts.

It hurts because it's like, it's like anywhere else.

Belgian wines or Belgian cheese.

No, you know, it's not the same.

It's quite our thing.

And I've been to USA, I've been to New York.

And I try the fries there, it's awful, disgusting.

They don't know what they're doing, actually.

And I think that's why they don't understand, you know?

So most of the time, when you say you're Belgian,

they understand it's, "Oh, fries, chocolate, OK."

But, uh, it's their French fries.

And it's not a big problem because it's not French.

Come on. It's not French.

(light music)

[Herr] You know, there's a joke

that goes, which country lies between Holland and France?

Well, it's just one big chip shop.

(chuckles)

It's Belgium. It's all chips.

Well, Belgium has nine million inhabitants.

Brussels, about one million inhabitants.

It's the capital, so naturally it's the capital of chips.

Because the chips, the fries

are a Belgian product in origin.

The name was given to us by the Americans, French fries.

Very strange because the French don't eat potatoes.

The French eat bread with their meal, you know?

We like our chips crunchy, I think.

You know, and the Belgian method is to have them deep

fried twice so they're really crunchy.

They're the best chips in the world.

**

It's a food that unifies our country.

It's like the cement that holds our people together.

(light music)

(engine rumbling)

Well, I am the ambassador

of the French Fry here in Belgium.

I want to have the fries, the genuine way, you know,

in a caravan, in a camper van alongside the roads.

I don't want these hospital

type of very clean chippies that we have now in Flanders.

I like the genuine steps.

I suppose we've reached our

fantastic, one of the best chip shops in the world here.

**

Bon soir.

(speaking in foreign language)

**

(speaking in foreign language)

**

- You know what they put on French fries

in Holland instead of ketchup? - What?

- Mayonnaise. - God damn!

- I seen them do it, man.

They fucking drown them in that shit.

(speaking in foreign language)

(light music)

- Yeah,what's every Dutch people are doing,

they're drowning with mayonnaise.

(chuckles)

- Ketchup.

- Dijon mustard. (speaking in foreign language)

- Well, I love sauce. (laughs)

- Fish and chips with curry sauce.

- I just want whatever.

- Uh, usually ketchup. - Buffalo, ranch.

- I'm going to say like putting it in honey mustard.

I prefer that over ketchup, honestly.

I like them with fresh butter on it.

That's why they made me fat.

See?

- Salt and vinegar. Always salt and vinegar.

- Salt and vinegar.

- Mayonnaise is when he go to Holland.

- Yeah, that's the European's. They're weird like that.

- This may get me booted off your film,

but I eat them plain.

I don't even have ketchup.

(light music)

(speaking in foreign language)

**

(sound from electric fry cutter)

**

(upbeat techno music)

(speaking in foreign language)

(playful music)

(singing in foreign language)

**

[Charles] The people in France follow

a story that French fries first appeared being sold

by street vendors on the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris.

But that wasn't until the 1840s.

My thinking is that France gets the French fried

by virtue of the fact that they were first prepared

in part of Belgium that was then part of France and became

known as French fries, probably largely because

of those Doughboy's who came back from World War One,

talked about the fries they'd had, but they were told about

that by Europeans who were French speaking Belgium's.

So go figure.

(singing in foreign language)

**

(speaking in foreign language)

(speaking in foreign language)

(singing in foreign language)

**

**

**

**

[Suzy] Yes, it's like a meditation.

Yes, and I'm quiet. Yes.

I have no agenda, no problem, and I--

But I don't see the time, you see what I mean?

I am singing, I am running my kitchen, I am--

I and with me. (chuckles)

I do this for my friends,

for my family, for people that I love.

When I was a little girl, I was about

five or six years old and I was going with my mother

every Saturday morning to the market.

She always bring me to a shop that they sell French fries.

And the French fries was so wonderful and they was very,

very blonde, but they was a little bit crispy, anyway.

I like to have these little pieces of salt and of potatoes.

It was, and I had my mother hand in my hand.

That was my dream.

I think that this moment

make me love more and more the French fries.

And so when I had my children, I want my children to know

French fries, but real good.

The French fries of my heart.

I put them in the oil.

Oh, I like that.

I like this moment.

(oil sizzling)

This moment is the first best,

but when you will take the second best,

it will be like a song.

You will remove the basket

like this and you will shake it.

And the French fries make like a song.

Yes, it's true. You will hear.

(oil sizzling)

[Malcolm] You know, if you've ever tried

to make fries yourself, it is really, really,

really hard to turn a potato into a crispy fry.

It's like, there's you know,

there is a whole art behind it.

And, you know, unless you have the right kind of potato,

unless you cure the potato for the correct amount

of time. You know, what temperature you

put it in the fryer for how long?

What kind of fat are you using to fry it?

All of those elements need to be standardized

and perfected to get a fry that works.

And if you're off in any one of those dimensions,

the fry, you know,

there's nothing worse than a failed fry.

(upbeat music)

[Scott] Making a French fry to cook

at home is a very hard task.

I think it's hard to make a French fry, period.

Now we're talking about how do you do all that

and then freeze the thing and then help someone revive

it, resuscitate it, bring it back to life and enjoy it?

I mean, that's really hard.

So we're working with a company called Mattson

to test and develop the fry and understand what might be

possible that is actually rooted in food science itself.

- Here's where we are today.

We have spent five weeks or so procuring ingredients,

reviewing the research, understanding the category,

looking at the competitive set and so forth.

And we will present to you

a number of prototypes for your review today.

The plan is for you to absorb what you've experienced,

provide feedback over the next week,

narrow the range to four or five ideas.

- And I think if there's one big to do, it is let's figure out

how to make sure that these things can get crispy.

- So, ready to go.

(upbeat music)

(upbeat music)

- Overall, there wasn't much potato coming through for me.

- The appearance kind of, you know, set me off there.

- Overall, it wasn't crispy enough.

- They felt processed?

- I like the bubbles on top.

- I actually liked it. I gave it an eight.

- Aroma was buttery and rich.

- Flowery, creamy, chewy.

- It was potatoey.

(upbeat music)

- I can't believe we just ate

seven hours worth of French fries.

(all laugh) - You got it!

Gotta burn those fries off.

(upbeat music)

* One, two, what's that sound? Come on! *

**

* One, two, what's that sound? Come on! *

[Announcer] This year, Britain celebrates

the 100th anniversary of fish and chips.

So Winston Churchill called them the good companions.

Certainly no other food has won

such a special place in the British way of life.

Although fried fish was on sale in the 1950s,

it took 10 years for some unknown genius to initiate

the historic association with the chip.

The oldest fried fish shop in the country is Malin's

within earshot of Bow Bells in London's East End.

It opened in 1960 and from this

small beginning grew a nationwide trade

that sells 50 million pounds worth a year.

- Chips are, without a doubt,

right at the core of British culture.

Everybody, if you go elsewhere around the world,

everybody talks about English and British and their

fish and chips.

- I do eat fish and chips, yeah.

I do like French fries.

They're a lot more salty here in

England though than normal chips.

And I do prefer just to have bigger chips.

- And Americans can't get the words right.

Chips are our crisps. And fries are our chips.

[Announcer] Fish and chips is one of the most

balanced meals you can eat.

The method of cooking seals in the goodness,

while chipped potatoes are four times

as nourishing as plain boiled.

- Well, even though my body's

a temple, I'm just looking for someone to worship it.

I've actually been eating chips for years.

Yeah, I know it's all hard to believe, isn't it?

-- be amazed at how good we look.

- Yeah, that's right, yeah.

[Announcer] This restaurant caters for the carriage trade

in Notting Hill Gate. But you can still go

in and ask for a piece of fish and eight of chips.

The only difference is you

will have a waiter to serve you and a wine list.

(romantic music)

- My childhood memories of fries, hmm...

- When I was younger, my Nan used to take me to

Weston-super-Mare, which is on the coast.

And we used to eat fish and chips there a lot.

- Yeah, when I was little. Kids...

A day trip out to there.

Get on a bus, a load of us.

Come out and have our chips.

[Announcer] And of course,

one of its chief attractions is its portability.

It seems to taste even better

eaten out of paper, strolling home from the cinema.

- Many, many years ago, chips bought from the chip

shop will be served in newspaper.

So you could remember opening up

and you still have all the pictures in the print all

over your hands when it gets

mixed in with the vinegar and the salt.

[Announcer] What really matters,

is that we can look forward to at least another

century of nourishing enjoyment.

Another hundred years of the good companions.

**

(light music)

[Martin] Hi. - Hi.

- I'm going to have...

I'll have standard cod, chips and mushy peas.

Do you have mushy peas? - Yeah.

Gotta have mushy peas, you know.

**

OK, here we go.

The nation's favorite, fine fish and chips.

There you go. Looking good.

My name's Martin Parr. I'm a photographer.

Now, I've been photographing food

for many years now, in fact,

when I started, no one was photographing food.

Now everybody does.

If you go to, you know, a posh restaurant,

everyone basically photographs every course.

But I would do that anyway.

And I've been doing this for maybe 20, 25 years.

And, of course,

chips and fries are an integral part of that.

And over the years,

I photographed chips countless times.

(whimsical music)

You know, we're constantly used

to seeing pictures in magazines where everything

looks beautiful, but in reality it's quite different.

So my job is really to punch, sort of the

propaganda surrounding food and to show the real food.

**

Well, I like very often people eating. I mean

if you go to a party or something and food's served,

people go completely haywire and bonkers.

You know, and that's always a good moment.

So I'm often behind

the counter waiting for people to pick up their food,

queue for the food, scramble for the food.

You know, food is ubiquitous.

We all have to eat it.

And it's also very colorful and pretty interesting.

Well, generally, fish and chip shops

use real potatoes. That helps a lot.

I think most fries around the world are just frozen.

Yours are fresh, aren't they? - They are fresh.

- There you go. - They are fresh everyday.

(birds squawking)

(waves crashing)

(birds squawking)

(waves)

(upbeat music)

**

**

(upbeat music)

**

[Arjen] Well, if you talk about fries,

then you talk about taste then talk about smell.

Memories start to come out.

Maybe childhood memories start to come out.

I still know very well at this moment with my family

and when you went to the beach and you get your fries.

Almost contrasting

with the smell of the sea, but also adding something.

And this memory is so strong

that if they are our customers and they taste these fries

on this place, maybe that's the new memory.

So I started up this project making a fry stand.

And traveling to strange places with it.

I started off in the fields

with farmers harvesting their potatoes.

Second landscape was

on a special island in the north of Holland.

It's called Tiscali.

I put it on the place where you'll have to walk one

and a half hour before you will find me.

(soft music)

And people don't recognize it immediately as art,

but they feel, OK, something's going on here.

Why is he standing on this spot?

Something is happening that's beyond imagination.

Next landscape will be Antarctica.

Pretty complicated to go to Antarctica with a fry stand.

I built some skis to put under the wheels.

Of course, my fries will be the best in Antarctica.

And they will be the only Fries in Antarctica.

(soft music)

Here on the beach, you have to breathe.

And I think

breathing the air from the sea is some kind of gift.

And the quality of being alone was maybe a great one.

I like to be alone, I wonder.

Yeah.

* Potato, potato, potato, potato, potato, potato *

* potato, potato, potato, potato, potato, potato *

* the red or white, the brown, they get that way underground *

* there can't be much to do *

* so now they have blue ones too *

* we don't care what they look like, we'll eat them any way *

* they can fit on our plate. Every way we can possibly eat *

*them and I think they're just great *

* potato, potato, potato, potato, potato, potato *

* potato, potato, potato, potato, potato, potato *

(upbeat music)

(foreign language)

- So we are here in Breña,

the Francisco's truck.

He is going to try Salchipapas.

Salchipapas is French fries, frankfurter sliced then fried

again, mixed with as much sauce as you want.

And that's it.

[Diego] Salchipapa it's a funny name as well, you know?

It's a word that is a mixture of sausage and potato.

We're lucky in Peru that we have these

yellow flesh potato is using Kanchan here for me

is a great potato for fries. Fries is a product that we

for introducing potatoes into the world diet.

I mean, potatoes has been

in the Peruvian culture for over 10,000 years.

(intense music)

You know, the Inca empire,

the thing with the most value

was not oil or gold or silver, it was food.

Well, they actually bailed out how to transport the potatoes.

How to make it grow in such a high altitude.

(speaking in foriegn language)

[Diego] You know, the potato cartel

that comes from the Andes? We're blessed to have them

now. Without Peru,

the world wouldn't get any French fries.

So we should call them actually, Peruvian fries.

(upbeat music)

[Announcer] Americans enjoy the wonders of the French fried potato,

but did you ever stop to wonder where they came from?

In 1802,

Thomas Jefferson brought back a recipe from France

and recorded it in his own handwriting at Monticello.

Jefferson later served French

fries as president and loved surprise his guests with silver

bowls full of this exotic dish.

[Ashbel] The mythology is that Thomas Jefferson was responsible

for bringing the recipes and foods

back to America when in fact, he wasn't.

And this is half pork fat and half duck fat.

So we're going to make French fried potatoes, using

what was most likely the available fat

in the 18th century.

James Hemings was the first American trained as a classic

French chef, and he was enslaved to

Thomas Jefferson. Trained in France at the best possible

location, Chateau de Chantilly, which was considered

in the 18th century, the best food in France.

And the dishes that he brought back from France,

macaroni and cheese, creme brulee, meringues, French fries.

There was actually no trace of fried potatoes in American

food culture before James Hemings got back from Paris.

It literally is a simple dish that went from Slave Kitchen

in Monticello around the world.

McDonald's, eat your heart out.

That is a beautiful thing right there.

We have no record of his recipe collection

because all of that was,

in my opinion, either destroyed by Jefferson

or given to Randolph, his relative who printed

the Virginia Housewife cookbook, which in my view is

probably the biggest culinary theft in history.

So this whole

notion that Jefferson cooked anything

is wrong. It's ignorant and it's pretty racist.

We owe that dish to James Hemings.

He brought French fries to America, definitely.

(carnival music)

(carnival music)

- I think French fries were like one of the most American

foods, and they just embody the American thing,

just like fried foods and they're easy, cheap,

and you can get them pretty much anywhere.

(carnival music)

- Fries are my go to comfort

food, I think for a lot

of Americans, it's very satisfying.

It's you know, it's got that mealy texture.

So you feel like you've eaten something substantial,

although you'll probably crash half hour after.

If you say, what do you think of when I say French fries?

I immediately think

Nathan's Coney Island summer walking the boardwalk,

the smell of the boardwalk, hearing the seagulls.

It's so part of my childhood,

having grown up right across the street.

Whenever you had a, you know,

a few extra nickels in your pocket, to your parent's

chagrin and despair, ruin your appetite for dinner

because you were eating French fries.

But it is you know, it's a passion.

[Charles] I think Americans think of French fries,

people around the world tend to think of French fries as

an American dish because it's so associated with American

quick service restaurants or fast food restaurants

and McDonald's probably at the lead of that.

(upbeat music)

[Lisa] Dick and Mac McDonald came

here from New Hampshire to Los Angeles around

the Great Depression. Back then, Los Angeles wasn't

yet car crazy, but it was just starting to get that way.

And they saw they identified

that the roads as they got developed

in the United States, were going to need places

to accommodate tourists, travelers.

The whole world was going faster and they just sort

of seized that idea that we need to accelerate how fast we

can both create and prepare the food, but how fast we can

get it out to you, the customer.

[Charles] Ray Kroc is the entrepreneur who founded

McDonald's Corporation as we know it.

He bought McDonald's

from Dick and Mac McDonald in San Bernardino, California,

when they had a single restaurant.

[Lisa] Ray was really taken with how

delicious the brother's fries were, and he was very

frustrated that he couldn't replicate the formula.

[Malcolm] Ray Kroc wanted to bring the perfect fry to the

world, to deliver us from the travesty of soggy fries.

[Charles] And he spent millions

of dollars in the early years of McDonald's when he could

hardly afford that, to perfect the French fry at McDonald's.

[Lisa] Everything that they did needed to be systematized

in a way so that the same taste you got out here

in California was one you would get in other places.

[Charles] They developed a technology

which enabled you to ship perfect fries throughout

the year, everywhere they need to go.

And that's what makes

the ubiquitous French fry today possible.

(upbeat music)

[Malcolm] McDonald's was a franchise

constructed around the French fry.

It wasn't burgers that made McDonald's McDonald's.

It was fries.

McDonald's rides this French fry recipe to glory.

They become the world's greatest fast food place.

You know, it's rare in history that one man can be said to be

responsible for some epochal event,

but the demise of the McDonald's French fry really can be laid

at the feet of a guy named Phil Sokoloff.

(dramatic music)

He's in many ways an exemplary figure.

You know, he's a kind of passionate,

brilliant, irascible in the way that

we like irascible self-made man in America.

He has had a near-death

experience, he has a heart problem,

he becomes convinced that managing his cholesterol

is the only way for him to survive.

But being a sort of

entrepreneur of kind of grand ambitions,

he is content not just to fix his own cholesterol,

but he would like to fix the cholesterol of all Americans.

And so he begins this public

campaign of shaming corporations.

He takes out ads in The Washington Post

and The New York Times and Wall Street Journal

and goes on morning talk shows accusing major corporations

who use animal fats in their products of killing Americans.

- I want people to lower their cholesterol and live longer.

That is my cause.

That is why I'm spending my money.

- I mean, no one had done this.

I mean, Ralph Nader done this about General Motors and cars,

but like, no one had done this with food before.

And he's going after the people who are making

food to the core of kind of American food identity.

(intense music)

Remember McDonald's in the early 80s.

They really are the paragon of American enterprise.

I mean, we venerate them

in the same way we venerate tech companies today.

And the idea that

a lone guy from Omaha, Nebraska, who no one's ever

heard of, can come and make them change the formula

that lies at the heart of their business.

I mean, it's just it's unheard of.

McDonald's had been using

beef tallow mixture, and so they switched

to another formula, which is heavily vegetable oils.

So the fry we have today is a kind of palate imitation

of the original fry paradigm of the 1960s.

And we've been living

with the consequences of that terrible decision ever since.

[Reporter] We know that French fries are

an unhealthy treat, but could eating them

on the regular send you to an early grave?

- Nutrition experts suggest

that six French fries really does equal the serving size

we're supposed to have and people lost their minds.

[Rachel] From my professional opinion, loving French fries has

a major sort of quality to it that's very appealing to us.

First of all, carbohydrates,

carbohydrates are what sugars are.

I mean, complex carbohydrates

like potatoes break down into sugars.

And that's why we love sugars, because it's easy,

accessible energy and we need that biologically.

So we're evolutionarily

programed to love carbohydrates.

Then we have saltiness,

which is also something that we're attracted to.

The saltiness is also often

associated with things that are proteins,

that we're also hardwired to be attracted to salty taste.

And then, of course, there's fat and fat is fabulous.

It feels really good in our mouth and it actually triggers

endorphin releases and dopamine release.

Both those things together

really do make you feel good, at least momentarily.

So French fries are

the perfect marriage of salt, fat and carbohydrate.

- Part of the thrill of a French fry is the notion that it is

decadent, that it's you know, you can't have a lot of it.

Why? Because it's bad for you.

So what do you do?

Well you reserve your consumption to those moments

in the day or in your week when it's appropriate.

And it is the tension between how good the thing tastes

and the discipline it takes to limit your intake.

That creates the beauty of the experience, right?

That's the whole point.

But if you turn these things into.

If you just make it

commonplace, if I say, you know what, I fixed the fry.

Now if you want, you can have, you know,

fries with every meal, what would be the point then?

Like you just what you've done is you have drained

the pleasure out of that experience.

(upbeat music)

- There is something to be said about the happiness that goes

into having a meal that's indulgent, and I think those

indulgences only come from when they're sporadic, right?

They only come from when it's a treat.

I feel like fries have been

a part of my life for so, so long.

I mean, I've truly grown up on them.

It was like after school snack.

In high school, you were just sitting

on the hood of your car, just munching on French fries.

It was so much a part

of my life that it almost wasn't a huge part just

because it was such a natural, normal thing.

It was a every day, it was a lifestyle.

Yeah, it really was. - A French Fries lifestyle.

(upbeat music)

- Oh, my gosh.

That's what these are for.

- Yes, it's cool.

- Oh, my God.

- OK, you go first. - I will.

I don't know. It just, I'm going

cheddar.

- It's incredible because you have the illusion

of lightness, right, crispiness,

and then you go into something soft and you think it's light.

And then in 20 minutes, we're going to regret it.

- I still don't believe

that they're unhealthy, though, in any way.

I mean, in comparison

to the things that most people love to eat,

if I could indulge in one thing, it would be fries.

You know,

I'm not a cake person, not cupcake, not ice cream.

We had a video of taking Luna

through her first McDonald's drive through and--

- Oh, my God,

that must have been an experience.

- So many people were like, my child is never going

to know what McDonald's tastes like.

You know, when you have access

to so many different types of food, why would you bring

them through a McDonald's drive through?

And for me, it's like nostalgia.

There's something exciting about that to me still.

And seeing her eat the exact

same thing I ate when I was little.

- It's nothing wrong about it.

If you if you don't eat

like pounds of fries, if you have moderation about it,

which we're not going to have today.

But if you have some. - I used

to grow up comparing French fries, you know, I was like,

Dairy Queen is good because they feel like they're sugared

and they follow a Burger King feels that same way too.

They have a crispy coating.

McDonald's is lighter. - Oh, so you know your fires.

Like really look like an expert, right?

Wow.

(intense music)

- All right,

so we've been asking everyone to name, some cuts of fries.

Just give me your thoughts.

- Crinkle cut fries.

For some reason,

people often under fry the crinkle cut fry.

They come out to blond.

They don't have a lot of texture to them.

I also think they they kind of look childish.

Shoestring fries are same.

They're not so satisfying on the plate like they're

in that weird zone, like, is this a fork thing?

Is this a hand thing?

You know what I mean?

I do not like McDonald's French fries.

I do not like them, anyone that thinks

the McDonald's French fry is good cold, just please don't

talk to me about it because they will affect everything

I think about everything else you think.

Most curly fries,

if you are honest with yourself, are not good.

If they have a coating on them, they can be OK.

But that's about the coating. Adding a coating

to the outside of the fry is just cheating.

You ever had a good wedge fry?

No, you haven't.

Let me say this, tater tots are delicious.

Anyone that doesn't think

a tater tots is delicious is incorrect.

Are they in the same family of French fries?

Well, they are a fried potato product.

They are closer to a French

fry than they are to a mashed potato.

They are closer to a hash

brown than they are to a French fry.

And ain't nobody thinking that a hash brown is a French fry.

Here's the metric. If you said

give me some fries and I handed you tater tots,

you'd be like, I didn't say I want tater tots.

I said, I wanted fries.

- Napoleon, give us some your tots.

- No, go find your own.

- Come on, give some your tots.

- No, I didn't get to eat anything today.

Gross.

- People get mad if you say the tater tots are a French fry.

My name is Kelsey McKinney.

I'm a freelance writer.

I'm going to talk about how

tater tots play into the history of the French fry.

It's two brothers, the Grigg brothers, Nephi and Golden.

Golden is just kind of like the younger

hang on.

He doesn't really matter in the story.

So the late 40s,

the Grigg brothers are only making corn.

They're not really working toward making potatoes.

But American culture really changes the way that we eat

dinner changes after

World War Two. In between 1945

and 1946, Americans consumed more than

eight hundred million pounds of frozen food.

It was all we ate, basically.

So Nephi and his brother are

looking at each other thinking, this is a huge market.

This is something that we can

jump into that we can become super rich off of.

And so they mortgaged their farm and buy a bigger farm

on the Oregon Idaho border, they name it Ore-Ida.

And they start making French fries.

(upbeat music)

What the machinery does is it

chops the potatoes very roughly on the sides and then

it slices it in kind of like a tic tac toe pattern.

So what you're losing is a ton of potato, right?

You're losing the whole outside.

Anything that's not a perfect cube can't be a fry.

So now he has a lot of extra

potato product that he can't use.

This is very upsetting

to Nephi because he's a child of the Great Depression.

He grew up having not enough

food and he's looking at all of these potato scraps.

This is a ton of money that he's throwing away.

And so he's frustrated and he's looking at it

thinking like these are potatoes, potatoes are food.

If only we could find a way

to turn this into a product that could make me money.

He calls for this guy whose name is lost to history,

because Nephi did not think it was important, apparently.

And that guy helps him come up

with a way to create basically like tubes of this

potato product that would then be shoved through a funnel

and then chopped off so that you can fry them.

(upbeat music)

So Nephi has these small potato pods,

he knows he's going to this convention with a ton of other

potato guys, the National Potato Convention

is held in 1954 at the Fountain Blue in Miami.

It's a brand new hotel, shiny, beautiful.

It's the kind of place that like movie stars going.

And you also have three

hundred members of the National Potato Convention.

Nephi sneaks down into the kitchen and talks

to the chef. He bribes him into letting him put a little

platter of his potato product on each of the tables.

And he's like, can I please just can I please do this?

And the chef says, Sure, fine,

I don't care, because why would you care?

It's a potato convention. It does not matter.

And of course, they're a massive hit.

It takes off immediately.

I mean, this is a food than if you're a 50s housewife.

That's a dream come true.

It's just great, crunchy fun.

Easy to serve your kids, right?

You shove it in the oven

and spend the rest of your day drinking martinis.

(upbeat music)

(upbeat music)

- So we've got a really exciting set of distinguished guests

this evening that we're looking forward to tasting

and actually critiquing these fries and giving feedback.

We have Kate Krater,

super experienced kind of New York restaurant

reviewer, food writer Hannah Chang,

who's half of the founders of Mimi Cheng's Dumplings

and Zen, who has cooked for the last

two of our Big Sur Kensington's tasting parties.

- Yeah, when we invite people, we want to invite people also

who aren't scared to say the truth.

We want those people that are not scared to.

- At this party?

Yeah, absolutely.

Our freezer is loaded.

This is the classic potato fry.

This is a harissa fry.

This is a medley of both sweet

potatoes and a Japanese sweet potato.

This is a 30 percent parsnip

tater tots and 70 percent potato.

- It's a really beautiful sweetness to it.

I think that's a first really nice texture.

- Yeah, this is the sweet potato.

- We're working on these for

a product for sale in grocery stores.

These fries here and these

tater tots are basically the exact thing that someone

would experience in their own home.

- Minus the lovely tray of Uni.

- Minus the lovely tray of Uni.

I mean, that is... Uni not included.

- Hello, how's it going? Good to see you.

Yeah. Thank you so much for coming.

Yeah.

- It doesn't really take much to twist my arm for a French fry party.

- This is our take on like a classic straight ahead fry,

but reinvented with a specialty potato.

- It's really good, it's got almost

a built-In tang like salt and vinegar potato chips

but as a French fry.

- What do you think of this one?

- A palate opening French fry.

It's got a lot of flavor. - It's nice

that it gets crispy on the bottom,

which isn't what happens with any of the other fries.

- Not those though. Those look disgusting.

I mean, I kind of love wedges. - Do you really?

(crosstalk)

(upbeat music)

- Does anybody like this one the best?

This is the regular one.

- No, sorry, that's just a no for me.

- Yeah, it's fine.

- The classic is the hardest to win.

- It is, yeah.

Everybody has their own personal favorite and they're

like, no, nothing's going to overthrow that.

- Like what could be improved here?

- Just make it like McDonald's.

- Exactly.

- We totally understand that the frozen French fry is broken.

Right. It doesn't like to live up

at all out to like the restaurant.

So we're trying to solve that.

And I don't think we've hit it.

- Well, thank you. That that's super helpful.

- Yeah, yeah.

[Scott] So after a lot of hard work and really over about a

year of development, we didn't love where we're

at with the fries and ultimately if we don't

love it, we don't launch it, we would rather stick to our

knitting until we're really confident to go

into the hallowed space of the French fry.

You know,

it's a quest that will remain in our mind and in our heart.

But until we're compelled

by a new breakthrough, I don't think we're going

to come out with a French fry anytime soon.

- Someone comes home with a bag

of frozen fries, first of all, this is a fine thing to do.

Same thing is in that bag

that ninety nine percent of the restaurants are using.

Right. Don't feel bad about that.

Don't make the mistake of putting them in the oven.

Fry them, fry them, please fry them.

Just suck it up and deep fry it.

(door bell buzzes)

Yes, hello, (foreign language).

- You hear the French fries.

They are singing,

you see?

(foreign language singing)

(foreign language singing)

* La la la la *

[Malcolm] Food is something that, given its extraordinary

place in our lives, we don't talk about it nearly enough.

Come on, we--

This is a subject that bears

so much more conversation and thought.

I think if you think about fries, about why you're drawn

to them, I think you become someone who is much

more responsible in the way you eat them.

Let's make the fry decadent

again and let's make it a treat.

That, to me, is the direction we should be going with fries.

(foreign language singing)

(applause)

(whimsical music)