Grinding It Out by Ray Kroc Page B

hamburger store. It gets pretty cold in April in the Chicago area, so our furnace was put into action right away. The problem was that the fans for the griddle and fry vats would exhaust all the heat the furnace was putting out and continually blow out the pilot light. This could have allowed gas to accumulate dangerously. The temperature inside the store would hover around forty degrees. As the weather warmed up, the reverse happened, cool air was exhausted, allowing the inside temperature to climb up to around a hundred degrees.
    A subject of much greater concern to me, however, was the great french-fry flop. I had explained to Ed MacLuckie with great pride the McDonald’s secret for making french fries. I showed him how to peel the potatoes, leaving just a bit of the skin to add flavor. Then I cut them into shoestring strips and dumped them into a sink of cold water. The ritual captivated me. I rolled my sleeves to the elbows and, after scrubbing down in proper hospital fashion, I immersed my arms and gently stirred the potatoes until the water went white with starch. Then I rinsed them thoroughly and put them into a basket for deep frying in fresh oil. The result was a perfectly fine looking, golden brown potato that snuggled up against the palate with a taste like … well, like mush. I was aghast. What the hell could I have done wrong? I went back over the steps in my mind, trying to determine whether I had left something out. I hadn’t. I had memorized the procedure when I watched the McDonald’s operation in San Bernardino, and I had done it exactly the same way. I went through the whole thing once more. The result was the same—bland, mushy french fries. They were as good, actually, as the french fries you could buy at other places. But that was not what I wanted. They were not the wonderful french fries I had discovered in California. I got on the telephone and talked it over with the McDonald brothers. They couldn’t figure it out either.
    This was a tremendously frustrating situation. My whole idea depended on carrying out the McDonald’s standard of taste and quality in hundreds of stores, and here I couldn’t even do it in the first one!
    I contacted the experts at the Potato & Onion Association and explained my problem to them. They were baffled too, at first, but then one of their laboratory men asked me to describe the McDonald’s San Bernardino procedure step-by-step from the time they bought the potatoes from the grower up in Idaho. I detailed it all, and when I got to the point where they stored them in the shaded chicken-wire bins, he said, “That’s it!” He went on to explain that when potatoes are dug, they are mostly water. They improve in taste as they dry out and the sugars change to starch. The McDonald brothers had, without knowing it, a natural curing process in their open bins, which allowed the desert breeze to blow over the potatoes.
    With the help of the potato people, I devised a curing system of my own. I had the potatoes stored in the basement so the older ones would always be next in line for the kitchen. I also put a big electric fan down there and gave the spuds a continuous blast of air, which greatly amused Ed MacLuckie.
    â€œWe have the world’s most pampered potatoes,” he said. “I almost feel guilty about cooking them.”
    â€œThat’s all right, Ed. we’re gonna treat ’em even better. We’re gonna fry ’em twice,” I told him. I explained the blanching process the potato people had recommended we try. We gave each basket of fries a preliminary dip in the hot oil and let them drip dry and cool off before cooking them all the way through. Finally, about three months after we’d opened the store, we had potatoes that measured up to my expectations. They were, if anything, a little better than those tasty morsels I’d discovered in San Bernardino. We worked it out so the blanching was