McDonald's french fries, marketed as World Famous Fries, [1] are a French fries product at the fast food restaurant McDonald's.
McDonald's french fries, marketed as World Famous Fries, [1] are a French fries product at the fast food restaurant McDonald's.
Introduced in 1949, the French fries were cooked in a mixture of 93% beef tallow and 7% cottonseed oil. [2] [3]
In the 1950s, CEO and founder Ray Kroc established quality control measures for McDonald's suppliers, ensuring potatoes maintained a solids content within the optimal range of twenty to twenty-three percent. [4] Kroc also pioneered the practice of "curing" the potatoes to convert sugars to starch, thus achieving consistently crisp French fries. This process involved storing potatoes at warm temperatures for several weeks. [4] Additionally, he introduced the "potato computer," developed by Louis Martino, to calculate the precise cooking time for fries, based on the fluctuation of oil temperature during frying. [4] Subsequently, in 1967, Kroc contracted the Simplot company to supply them with frozen fries, replacing fresh-cut potatoes.
In the late 1980s, Phil Sokolof, a millionaire businessman who had suffered a heart attack at the age of 43, took out full-page newspaper ads in New York, Chicago, and other large cities accusing McDonald's menu of being a threat to American health, and asking them to stop using beef tallow to cook their french fries. [5]
After this sustained campaign, including by the National Heart Savers Association against saturated fats and the beef tallow they were using, [6] [7] [8] in 1990, they switched to vegetable oil with beef flavouring. [9] [2] McDonald's has not disclosed whether its beef flavouring contains meat, but it is known to contain milk byproducts. [10] In 2002, McDonald's paid US$10 million to settle lawsuits that accused the chain of mislabeling its French fries as vegetarian. [11]
The "thin style" French fries have been popularized worldwide in large part by McDonald's and, to a lesser extent, Burger King. [12]
In 2008, McDonald's ceased using trans fats in both US and Canadian markets. [9] In 2013, McDonald's Canada introduced poutine nationwide, after having it in Quebec for 10 years. [13]
In the United States, McDonald's french fries are made using 19 ingredients, which include dextrose, TBHQ, polydimethylsiloxane, citric acid, and sodium acid pyrophosphate. [14] [15] The restaurant uses non-GMO [16] russet and Shepody potatoes.
As of 2019, the french fries sold in Germany use a different recipe, with the ingredients being listed as potatoes, sunflower oil, rapeseed oil, salt, dextrose, disodium phosphate and polydimethylsiloxane. [17]
As for the manufacturing process, the potatoes are first brought to the plant, where they are mechanically cut, blanched, partially fried, flash-frozen, and then shipped to individual restaurants of the franchise. [16]
French fries, chips, finger chips, french-fried potatoes, or simply fries, are batonnet or julienne-cut deep-fried potatoes of disputed origin from Belgium or France. They are prepared by cutting potatoes into even strips, drying them, and frying them, usually in a deep fryer. Pre-cut, blanched, and frozen russet potatoes are widely used, and sometimes baked in a regular or convection oven; air fryers are small convection ovens marketed for frying potatoes.
A hamburger, or simply a burger, is a dish consisting of fillings—usually a patty of ground meat, typically beef—placed inside a sliced bun or bread roll. The patties are often served with cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, bacon, or chilis with condiments such as ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, relish or a "special sauce", often a variation of Thousand Island dressing, and are frequently placed on sesame seed buns. A hamburger patty topped with cheese is called a cheeseburger. Under some definitions, and in some cultures, a burger is considered a sandwich.
A fast-food restaurant, also known as a quick-service restaurant (QSR) within the industry, is a specific type of restaurant that serves fast-food cuisine and has minimal table service. The food served in fast-food restaurants is typically part of a "meat-sweet diet", offered from a limited menu, cooked in bulk in advance and kept hot, finished and packaged to order, and usually available for take away, though seating may be provided. Fast-food restaurants are typically part of a restaurant chain or franchise operation that provides standardized ingredients and/or partially prepared foods and supplies to each restaurant through controlled supply channels. The term "fast food" was recognized in a dictionary by Merriam–Webster in 1951.
Poutine is a dish of french fries and cheese curds topped with a brown gravy. It emerged in Quebec in the late 1950s in the Centre-du-Québec region, though its exact origins are uncertain, and there are several competing claims regarding its invention. For many years, it was used by some to mock Quebec society. Poutine later became celebrated as a symbol of Québécois culture and the province of Quebec. It has long been associated with Quebec cuisine, and its rise in prominence has led to its growing popularity throughout the rest of Canada.
A sausage is a type of meat product usually made from ground meat—often pork, beef, or poultry—along with salt, spices and other flavourings. Other ingredients, such as grains or breadcrumbs, may be included as fillers or extenders.
Gravy is a sauce made from the juices of meats and vegetables that run naturally during cooking and often thickened with thickeners for added texture. The gravy may be further coloured and flavoured with gravy salt or gravy browning or bouillon cubes. Powders can be used as a substitute for natural meat or vegetable extracts. Canned and instant gravies are also available. Gravy is commonly served with roasts, meatloaf, rice, noodles, fries (chips), mashed potatoes, or biscuits.
Suet is the raw, hard fat of beef, lamb or mutton found around the loins and kidneys.
Tallow is a rendered form of beef or mutton suet, primarily made up of triglycerides.
The cuisine of Québec is a national cuisine in the Canadian province of Québec. It is also cooked by Franco-Ontarians.
There are multiple urban legends centering around the fast-food chain McDonald's. These legends include claims about the food and allegations of discrimination by the company.
Rémoulade is a cold sauce. Although similar to tartar sauce, it is often more yellowish, sometimes flavored with curry, and often contains chopped pickles or piccalilli. It can also contain horseradish, paprika, anchovies, capers and a host of other items.
Chicken McNuggets are a type of chicken nuggets sold by the international fast food restaurant chain McDonald's. They consist of small pieces of reconstituted boneless chicken meat that have been battered and deep fried. Chicken McNuggets were conceived by Keystone Foods in the late 1970s and introduced in select markets in 1981. The nuggets were made available worldwide by 1983 after correcting a supply issue. The formula was changed in 2016 to remove artificial preservatives and improve the nutritional value.
Richard McDonald and Maurice McDonald, collectively known as the McDonald Brothers, were American entrepreneurs who founded the fast food company McDonald's.
Buttermilk Crispy Tenders were chicken strips sold by the international fast food restaurant chain McDonald's in the United States and Canada. Chicken Selects were introduced in early 1998 for a limited time and offered again in early 2002 and late 2003 and then permanently starting in 2004. In the UK, they were launched on the "Pound Saver Menu", which offers various menu items for £0.99.
A collop is a slice of meat, according to one definition in the Oxford English Dictionary. In Elizabethan times, "collops" came to refer specifically to slices of bacon. Shrove Monday, also known as Collop Monday, was traditionally the last day to cook and eat meat before Ash Wednesday, which was a non-meat day in the pre-Lenten season also known as Shrovetide. A traditional breakfast dish was collops of bacon topped with a fried egg.
McDonald's Corporation is the world's largest chain of fast food restaurants, serving around 68 million customers daily in 119 countries. McDonald's traces its origins to a 1940 restaurant in San Bernardino, California, United States. After expanding within the United States, McDonald's became an international corporation in 1967, when it opened a location in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada. By the end of the 1970s, McDonald's restaurants existed in five of the Earth's seven continents; an African location came in 1992 in Casablanca, Morocco.
A croquette is a deep-fried roll originating in the Mediterranean basin, consisting of a thick binder combined with a filling, which is then breaded. It is served as a side dish, a snack, or fast food worldwide.
Phil Sokolof was a multi-millionaire businessman and campaigner against heart disease. In the 1980s and early 1990s, his fight for heart health targeted the restaurant chain McDonald's. He is credited with using his own assets to help spur notable changes. The Los Angeles Times eulogized Sokolof saying, "In our big, complex bureaucratized society, there was indeed a case where one person made a difference, and where an idea had definite and beneficial consequences."