Behind the Fries
Anyone with at least some British blood in them should be well aware of the two most important vitamins in a healthy diet: Fish and chips. Those without any British backing may be confused as to why anyone would want to eat a bag of chips with their fish, but to set them straight would lead them into an even further confusing world of the differences between fries, chips, and crisps, and what means what, where.
As someone who works in a Fish and Chips restaurant I've become more than familiar with the inner workings of the chip manufacturing process. It may seem obvious as to what goes on, but when you think about how many chips need to be pumped out constantly to please the customers, you can easily realize that the simple way you go about making your chips, (or fries,) may be a lot different.
From the potato sack to the plate, the process of making chips isn't that complex. It starts with grabbing the large brown bag from the back room. The bag for first use is always marked with a black X, like a hidden cache of pirate loot. This package is the oldest of them all, making it important to get it out of there before it starts to go bad. Once the bag's been dragged out into the dish pit, it's propped up onto a small stool that clearly shows its age with it's peeling wooden surface and myriad of globs of glue holding the crumbling thing together. When the sack is ready, seated nicely beside the peeler, a quick cut of the tying strings opens it up, revealing the lovely dirt-grown potatoes--now ready for peeling.
There are three main pieces of machinery used in creating chips. The first of those is the peeler. Now, for a normal kitchen at home, not many potatoes are needed. That, along with the fact that there usually isn't much of a rush, leads to the chef hand peeling each potato with a hand peeler. But when it comes to the rush of a restaurant, hand peeling just isn't fast enough. That's where the peeler comes into play. The peeler is a fairly large, barrel-shaped machine. Inside, is a bumpy, rough and round platform that, when on, spins around really fast. When you pop a potato into the machine, the spinning and grinding quickly removes most of the skin from the potato. For maximum efficiency, you place around ten to fifteen potatoes at a time, depending on their size. Once ten to twenty seconds to pass, you unlock and open a small hatch in the peeler's side, and the potatoes all come rocketing out, into the sink. If you aren't chipping the potatoes as you peel them, the potatoes build up in the sink until they're all done, at which point you plug the sink and fill it with water so all the potatoes are soaking.
After, or during, peeling you move onto chipping. This is the step where the chips are finally created. This step also uses the next piece of machinery; the chipper. The chipper is a wall mounted work of metal. At it's base is a small grate with chip sized holes in it, and above that is a presser covered in bumps that fit perfectly into the grate gaps. All you have to do to transform the potato into a bundle of chips is by simply placing it on the grate, and pressing it down with the presser. This murders the potato, and chops it into several chips nearly ready for serving. A sack full of potatoes usually fills a sink about three-fourths full, and once the deed is done, the sink is filled with water to the same height as the potatoes. By soaking the chips, and potatoes, in water, you stop enzymes that you've recently exposed, from coming in contact with oxygen. When the enzymes are given oxygen, they begin to produce a brown and unappetizing color and so the bath keeps them nice and pretty for presentation. Once the water is ready, a cup of whitener is added and mixed in. This also stops the fries from going brown, as soon they will be exposed to the air as they wait to be fried.
Once fifteen or so minutes of sitting in the whitener bath are up, the sink is drained. Once that has finished, and the workers up front at the fryer need some, the chips are shoveled out of the sink, and into a container. This container is then race-carted up to the front. (Literally too. I usually put both hands on one end of the container, and simply push it nice and quickly to a snug little spot beside the fryers.)
Now, from here on I personally take no part in the chip-making process. The rest is taken over by the fryers and the waitresses, and so my knowledge of the process isn't exact. I can, however, guess from what I've seen, (and simple logic) that the chips are grouped together into small frying baskets. These baskets are then soaked in the deep fryer's oil for a short while before being taken back out as the very chips you lovingly digest. These chips are then placed onto plates as the orders demand, and the waitresses carry them over to the happy customers.
All-in-all, the making of chips isn't a rather long or complex process, but it is most likely very different from how you would make them at home. So go on out and enjoy your fish and chips once again, or, if you've been so terribly mistreated as to never having tasted fish and chips, do give it a try.
