When Fries Were Made From Scratch at the Number One Fast Food Chain

Yeah, I worked there in 1970 while going to school.

Occasionally I would come in on Saturday mornings and ‘make’ fries. This was early, well before the restaurant would open. Downstairs, there was a walk-in cooler and freezer. Inside the cooler sat 40 pound sacks of potatoes, ready to be hauled upstairs and manually transformed into the awesome side order, which incidentally went out the door at 15 cents a bag. As you’ll see, you got a whole lot of labor and TLC for robbing your piggy bank. Me, I got a buck sixty-five or so for a laborious hour.

After slugging a cumbersome sack of the spuds up the stairs, an apparatus awaited. A cylindrical drum, smaller than the 55 gallon variety, and internally lined with a coarse material. I likened it to about a 40 grit sandpaper. At the bottom was a door and exit chute. It had a lid, which I would lift up, and dump the bag of taters into the awaiting drum.

‘We want 15 percent of the skin left on the potatoes. If too much skin is left, it is unappealing. If there is no skin, too much potato is being wasted’.  I was told.

I flipped the power switch on the drum, and instantly the centrifugal force drove the Idaho tubers toward the coarse walls in chaotic fashion. The pounding and thumping echoed throughout the restaurant.. And after a few bags, I got it. No timer, just instinct, perfection.

A Kobra Fry 

The exit chute of the drum emptied into one of two commercial oversized stainless steel sinks, both filled with fresh water. Into the right sink the whole potatoes splashed from the chute of the drum. Straddling the center divider of the sinks was a cutting grid and handle similar to something you would use to extract water from a well. With an oversized three-prong fork, each potato would be stabbed, placed on top of the cutting grid, and the downward pull of the handle would cut the spud into slices, which plummeted into the sink on the left. Tater after tater, one by one.

The entire south wall behind the sinks was stainless steel, riddled with hooks which held dozens of fryer baskets waiting to be dropped into hot oil.

When all the potatoes were cut, I grabbed them out of the water, and emptied them into the fryer baskets equally, but not filling them. They covered the entire wall, dripping and drying. The process was repeated over and over until the magic began…blanching.

The blanching temperature and time was a mystery to me, as I wasn’t involved with that part of the prep, but the temp was lower than the eventual final dropping. As the morning wore on, rows of baskets with blanched fries began to populate the silver wall. And the key to their awesomeness (besides the oil) was time. The fries that sat on the wall for hours after blanching were magnificent. When the noontime rush depleted the stock, and the time duration between blanching and frying diminished, so did the texture and flavor, in my opinion of course.

Towards the end of my stint there, less than one year, something happened. Deep down in the freezer section, a new product arrived on the scene, frozen mass produced french fries, ready to be dropped. A massive amount of labor was about to be saved. Yeah, I tried ’em, and my unsophisticated 18 year old taste determined they didn’t measure up to the hand crafted variety. Of course the frying oil was animal based until 1990, when it was switched to the vegetable variety. 

So if you were around back then, maybe you got a chance to sample this scrumptious side order…with no idea what went into making them.