The Fake (and real) History of Potato Chips

Happy 2024! Welcome back food history lovers, young and old. Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE and leave me a comment of what other historic dishes you'd like me to explore. And check out my new site, www.tastinghistory.com/, feedback appreciated.

As someone who lived in Saratoga Springs for many, many, many years, I can tell that this is going to get under the skin of many a local. And I'm all here for it.

i like how even the apocryphal story of how chips were """invented""" in Saratoga has a customer asking the chef to recreate a dish that already existed...

Former Frito-Lay QA tech here. Thank you for briefly explaining the purpose of air-fill. I knew some of the lab techs who spent hours counting broken chips to determine the amount of air-fill needed to deliver the most acceptable amount of breakage. It was tedious work.

I worked in Reseach and Development, first for Procter and Gamble and then for Frito Lay. I did a lot of work on Potato Chips both at P&G and Frito Lay. The slice thickness of potato chips made from freshly sliced potatoes is critical to the quality of the finished product. If you slice them too thin the oil will penetrate completely through the slice from both sides and the chip will be oil-soaked and unpleasant to eat. If you slice them thicker than oil will only penetrate to a certain depth on each side and the center of the chips will consist of dehydrated but not fried potato. The dehydrated potato tends to be the remnants of potato cells as globules of dried starch. There is no oil in this layer. This layer is also very crunchy, even hard. It makes eating a lot of thick chips wear on the mouth even to the point of abrading the gums. Fried potato is an oily matrix containing filaments of starch that were created when the cell was ruptured during frying, the starch was first hydrated in-situ and then dehydrated in strands as frying continued. The reducing sugars in the potato cells were free to react with the potato protein to produce the wonderful Maillard reactants that make potato chips and french fries so popular. The potato filaments are very crispy and fracture easily with a pleasant snap when eaten. This means that the ideal thickness is a compromise in flavor and mouth feel which is thick enough to not be oil soaked but thin enough to not contain much dehydrated but unfried potato cells in the core. It is a flat cut, not a wavy or ruffled cut. The oil in a finished potato chip is very easily oxidized and the starch filaments are very hygroscopic. Keeping the chip fresh requires both packaging in nitrogen and having very high barrier packaging films. Potato chip cans were used by several companies (Charles Chips) but in the late 1980s packaging films were developed which were both high barriers for oxygen and humidity and economical to produce. For these reasons, thin flat potato chips have the highest share of the potato chip market not to take away from the other important variants such as kettle chips, ruffled chips, or stacked chips.

In the early 1960s the firm Lays/Smiths, probably inspired by allready up and coming basic technology in the field, commissioned the development of a more efficient way of adding seasoning/flavor, specifically paprika powder, to potatoe chips/crisps on an industrial scale, rather than adding little bags of sticky, lumpy powder to the package, or the earlier machinery someone mentioned in the comments. The clever Dutch (yes) guy who eventually invented/designed the fully automated system (elements of which are still used today by chips/crisps factories worldwide, over 60 years later) to evenly dispense the yummy dusty stuff was my beloved stepfather, Piet Van Lienen, who passed away at the age of 90 this Christmas. The 'paprikapowdershootingmachine' story has for decades been an amusing anecdote in my family and I got to tell it to one of his grandkids at his funeral. So this episode is extra special to me!

I have one small correction for your history segment: potato chip bags aren't filled with air. They're filled with a relatively inert gas, usually pure nitrogen. This is because, in addition to providing cushioning to reduce breakage, displacing all the oxygen before sealing the bag also prevents the chips from oxidizing, letting them last even longer on the shelf without browning until the bag is opened.

One of my favorite ways to make a crispy potato snack is to use a veggie peeler, and shave an entire potato (not bothering to skin it first) into super thin slices and then flash fry them in crisco (they do not take very long to cook) and lay them on a wire rack with a paper towel under the rack (so the potatoes do not come in contact with the soon to be soggy paper) then sprinkle with either Old Bay or Lawry's season salt. Pair with your choice of dipping sauce.

I often have my wife pick a number 16-238. We shuffle through to the recipie and do our best to make whatevers on the menu. It often turns out teriible or its something neither of us knew we would like, but we try our best and read the history and/or watch the video while we cook. Its always our favorite go to date idea. Love the book. Love the videos. Thank you Max Miller for making and doing something so awesome.

My mom told me a story about her older brother, who she adored. She said that in the late 1920s he would go down to the potato chip plant in Memphis. They would give him the burnt chips. He would take them, rebag them in paper bags he bought, and then would walk about 2 miles pulling his wagon and sell the chips to the riverboat workers. On his way home, he would buy more bags for the next day. She said he was only about 9 years old and his income he gave to his mom for the family. My grandkids love making their own potato chips. Grown up stuff ya know.

So a fun bit of trivia about Pringles: the machine that was designed to cut and fry them was invented by a German gentleman whose name is obscure, however one of the men who helped develop and engineer the machine was a man named Gene Wolfe. Wolfe would later become one of the most critically acclaimed and influential authors of science fiction and fantasy novels (particularly his Book of the New Sun). When asked years later if he'd change anything about the chips themselves, he simply remarked "I would have made them thicker".

In the Philippines we have what we went a little bit further, using sweet potato cut thick (somewhere about the 1/4" range) and frying them with brown sugar. They would then get skewered in a bamboo stick and called "kamote-cues," with "kamote" being the local word for sweet potatoes and adding the "-cue" because it resembles barbecue skewered meat.

This channel is my depression comfort food. When the world feels like too much, I can always count on the history of potato chips to blissfully take me far away.

When I was a kid we had a blind neighbour, she was a very sweet lady and we knew better than thinking we could goof around because she would know. And this lady was fully blind, she had 0% sight. What she also knew were the sounds of different foods cooking and when they were done. Her fries were the best though, she made them by hand, pre-fry them (don't know if that's the right term, English isn't my first language) And then deep fry them on a higher temperature till they were done. And she was spot on every single time. Nice and crispy on the outside and soft and fluffy on the inside. So when the chip was invented they didn't have thermometers, but maybe they also listened better like my neighbour.

In Britain the thick-cut chips were known as game chips. As the name suggests, they were served with strong-flavoured game meats, particularly venison and pheasant.

This channel reminds me of when I had to do a class on the history of clothing as part of an art history degree. Being an overly angry teenager, I was initially furious about it, until I realised that this stuff was in no way superficial and I was gaining fascinating insights into social history. Not saying your channel ever angered me, just that the ultimate benefit is pretty much the same.

A few years back, me and my buddy moved into a place and before we got around to going to the store, a huge blizzard hit and we were stuck with nothing to eat but some potatoes. We didn't know what to really do, because at the time we didnt have any culinary knowledge at all, but we figured that we have oil, a deep pan, and potatoes and that equals chips. They were the best chips I've ever had, and I make them more often than buying a bag, and it's way cheaper (at least where I live)

Ta very much for the mention! And goodness me, those chips look delicious. I used to make them like this in our garden, make a little fire, put a tobacco tin on top of the fire, add some oil add thinly sliced potatoes, use a pointy stick as a fork, delicious. And I almost never burned half the garden down.

Funny enough, my flatmate has been making his own potato chips for roughly seven years, and now he has a new recipe to try out. May our kitchen survive this year because it almost didn't last year

I always love the history you bring, but the level of detail of the cooking steps are next level also. Well done!