And that’s considered fast, compared to how long it took before today’s tech was available. This attention to detail is why it can take McDonald’s 6 months to change a single ingredient in a single menu item. How does McDonald’s know the precise balance of ingredients needed to achieve the ideal color and flavor? They use both an army of focus groups and wildly sophisticated technologies, including a mechanical mouth which employs up to 250 sensors to make sure their fries have the exact right mouthfeel. The end result is then dyed to achieve a totally consistent, appealing color, so the fries look the same no matter the season or batch of potatoes (and never turn brown). Only the top potatoes are chosen (yes, they’re actually made from potatoes), and these are cut to a uniform size by a super high speed water gun combined with tiny knives. The company is also obsessive about the presentation of its fries. The fries don’t taste sweet per se - but your brain detects that the sugars are there, and enjoys the harmony with the salt and fat.Īnd that’s just the beginning. This engages the third leg of the holy trinity of fat, salt and sugar. McDonald’s also adds dextrose to their fries in a perfectly controlled proportion. It’s basically a perfume for potatoes that tricks our brains into thinking they’re the OG beefy fries, despite the fact that the modern ones are cooked in cholesterol-free vegetable oil. So instead, McDonald’s has carefully engineered a scent for their fries that exactly mimics potatoes cooking in beef fat. The originals were cooked in beef tallow, which is no longer supportable from a health perspective. How do they do it? By employing enough food science, psychology and high-tech equipment to make the most devoted Molecular Gastronomist’s head spin.Įvery aspect of McDonald’s menu is carefully broken down, analyzed and optimized. The fact that their food tastes delicious (or at least delicious enough to inspire 24 billion customer visits per year) is a small miracle. The fact that McDonald’s pulls this off at all is remarkable. Oh, and the end result needs to be dirt cheap, rivaling the lowest cost meals a customer could cook at home. ![]() To top it all off, your raw ingredients for all this come from a wildly diverse set of suppliers, including as many as 400,000 individual farms. They also need to be cooked fast by people with limited experience, going from storage (often frozen) to a customer in a matter of minutes. ![]() And once they get there, they need to taste absolutely consistent–whether they were eaten at your flagship store in Times Square, or a truckstop restaurant attached to a gas station along Interstate 5 at 2am. They need to be delivered through a serpentine supply chain to over 13,000 locations. You’ll need about 6.5 million of these per day. You need to create burgers and fries that will appeal to nearly every member of a 300 million+ person nation (I’m ignoring McDonald’s brisk international business for now). When it comes to science, though, Molecular Gastronomy has nothing on McDonald’s. You can now get a sous vide egg bite at Starbucks, and scientific ingredients like xanthan gum are making their way into the toolkits of many high-end chefs, and even enlightened home cooks. The movement is epitomized by Nathan Myhrvold’s masterwork Modernist Cuisine, a tome that clocks in at 2,438 pages, cost untold millions, and took a staff of 36 to produce.īut its tenets have trickled down to restaurants everywhere. ![]() In are centrifuges, liquid-nitrogen-powered flash freezers, and rotor-stator homogenizers. The kitchen of a Molecular Gastronomy restaurant looks more like a lab than a space for making food. The movement seeks to break down foods and flavor into their constituent molecular parts, and reassemble/explore them in new and innovative ways. There’s a big trend right now towards a cooking movement called Molecular Gastronomy. Why do I love McDonald’s? Here’s a few reasons–and some reasons foodies shouldn’t turn up their noses at the iconic Golden Arches. When I read Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser’s scathing expose about the fast food industry, it made me hungry. Supersize Me left me unfazed - the burgers frankly looked a lot better to me than the vegan fare at the end. I’m fully willing to drop $75 on a really good duck breast.īut (and this really shouldn’t have to be a “but”), I also love, love, love McDonald’s. I spend an ungodly portion of my income at Whole Foods. I’m an avid follower of Thomas Keller, and have visited every branch of his fantastic Bouchon bistro, from Napa to Vegas to New York. I’ve eaten at some of the world’s best restaurants–from the three-Michelin-started pastoral splendor of Meadowood, to the cozy rooms of Alice Waters’ iconic Chez Panisse, to restaurants owned by Iron Chefs and cultural legends like Ayesha Curry.
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