kristoff wrote: Sun Dec 28, 2008 8:31 pm McDonald's is a stomach rot and gas factory. Haven't done them in years. KFC is tolerable about once in 3-4 years. A pig-out followed by a possible barf-out, followed by a week of recovery.... Never mind...
As a professional cook I feel strange defending McDonald’s but for a lot of years you could count on McDonald’s for superb fries. A lot of restaurants don’t do anything that well. It is a common misconception that fries are easy; doing them right is not.. They have to be cut (uniformly), soaked, dried and fried twice at two different temperatures, in oil that is at least reasonably fresh and cleaned regularly. I have eaten enough bad fries in enough places to testify that bad fries are easy to make. Mealy, limp, greasy, or beautifully browned and raw in the middle, or reeking of rancid oil; there are so many ways to do them wrong. For a lot of years McDonald’s kept tight control over their franchises, and anywhere in the country you could get great fries. The last decade or so they over expanded, loosened quality control, and caved in to the healthy lobby (as if fries were ever going to be healthy food) and dropped beef fat from their frying oil, losing a lot of flavor in the process, so now it’s a crap shoot. Sometimes they are pretty good, often not.
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