These are McDonald's fries.
And this is everything that's in McDonald's fries.
Welcome to "Fast Food Chemistry."
So, this episode is a little different
because we're not just interested
in the current McDonald's fries,
but also the iconic original McDonald's fries,
which were introduced back in 1955.
We spent weeks working out what we think
is an almost exact recipe for the modern fries
and a recreation of the original fries,
which no one's had access to for 30 years.
I haven't had those since I was a kid,
so I too am going to test the original McDonald's recipe
to see if they're as good as I remember.
Let's get started.
We managed to track down a document online
which apparently contains
all of the original McDonald's recipes.
I too have the McMenu recipe,
with a few changes from Harry
to make it even closer to the original recipe.
The original recipe is potatoes, of course,
sugar, canola oil, corn syrup,
salt, and beef tallow.
I bought one of these,
'cause it said it was 1.5 pounds.
I thought that, "Wow, that's a lot."
Turns out it's not a lot.
Oh. My helper has arrived.
When there are so few ingredients in fries,
there's one thing that makes a big difference,
and that's potatoes.
McDonald's primarily use russet Burbanks,
which we've managed to get our hands on today.
These are a specialist variety of potato
and as a consumer
are a little bit hard to come by in the UK.
This, of course, is a russet potato.
This looks exactly like what I think a potato looks like.
I don't know what the difference between this potato
and other brands or types of potatoes there are.
Whatever the difference is, I don't know it.
According to the recipe that we have,
they should be around a quarter of an inch thick
and 4 to 6 inches long.
Pew.
Almost 6 inches.
5 inches, boom.
We'll do two potatoes.
Get the actual lumps of mud off of this one.
Water's going everywhere already. Good.
Washed.
This is how they do it in the Army, right?
If Gordon Ramsay could see this he'd blow a gasket.
We've gone to the extra effort
of getting one of these fry-cutting machines
so that we can get these nice
even quarter-inch-thick fries.
Here goes nothing.
Bang. Look at that.
That's pretty impressive, though.
Those look a lot like McDonald's fries.
Those look, yeah, pretty similar.
Check out this thing I got.
Here we go. [grunts]
[grunts] Come on.
[grunts]
So, when McDonald's are cutting their fries,
they fire potatoes through one of these grates
at 70 miles per hour.
Unfortunately, we do not have an enormous gas cannon,
so instead we just have me.
Come on.
Then we just need to soak them and refrigerate them.
So, to roughly 2 cups of hot water
I'm going to be adding a quarter cup of sugar
and 2 tablespoons of corn syrup.
2 tablespoons.
Yep, perfect.
Oh, [beeps].
This says "with vanilla."
Doesn't smell like vanilla.
Well, this is the one we're using.
All right, fries going in.
I'm going to put as many as I can
until this thing is, like, overflowing fries.
Whew, that's heavy.
Now it's time for the beef tallow.
It's quite, like, an old-fashioned thing.
I think my grandma used to cook things in beef tallow,
or beef dripping, as it's sometimes called.
Wow, that is very white.
Pure, pure white.
It looks like icing for a cake or something.
But probably tastes quite different.
It's like wax, like candle wax.
Doesn't have a very strong smell to it.
Maybe slightly beefy.
Doesn't really taste of anything.
It's just kind of a little bit chewy
and a little bit greasy, as you can imagine.
For those who don't know,
beef tallow is kind of the fat from the beef.
So when they're butchering up a cow,
they'll carve off the lumps of fat,
they'll kind of render them down to melt them down,
and then let it solidify again,
and this is what you're left with.
What?
So, this is beef tallow, right?
And what I understand
is that this is just rendered fat they use to cook, right?
Did you know anything about that?
I had never heard of this either.
Oh, yeah. What did he say the consistency of this is?
That this is like frosting?
Doesn't really smell like anything.
I mean, it has an odor, but I don't ...
I mean, very mild flavor.
It tastes blank, if that makes sense.
Now we have to find a way to melt this down into that.
It's like cutting the world's greasiest birthday cake.
Oh, wow. That's cool.
Theirs is like a big block of cheese.
This is our beef tallow.
Formula 47, 6 cups of beef tallow.
All right.
Why?
And then half a cup of canola oil.
If my mom cooked a beef Sunday roast,
it would smell like this throughout the house,
which, to me, fantastic.
Time to dry our fries.
This seems like what I'm supposed to do, correct?
Here we go.
Let's take these out.
We'll let them cool for 10 minutes
and then cook them again.
This is our system. All right.
Oof.
Yeah, my boys are soggo.
Get these guys back in there.
Watch out, Cats Domino, this stuff is hot.
And we're going to toss it with some salt.
And there we are. We have old-style McDonald's fries.
No one in this room has ever actually
tried the original recipe, until now.
A one, and a two, and a three. Yoop.
I don't know if this is the right kind of salt.
That might have been too much.
Harry: Obviously, I have to try one of these
while they're still warm.
These are regular McDonald's fries, the now fries.
Now the original "Fast Food Chemistry" fries.
OK, wow. That's really, really good.
You really do taste the beef.
I've never had a McDonald's fry like that before,
and I actually think I might prefer that
to what we have right now.
These are way better.
I might have oversalted them, but it doesn't matter.
Further testing required.
I mean, these are fantastic.
I gotta say, I think I get it.
I think I get why people miss these so much.
These are so flavorful.
It's kind of surprising, because the tallow itself
didn't have that much of a strong smell or a strong taste,
but I think when you cook it, it really kind of
brings out that rich flavor and imparts it onto the fry.
They don't taste beefy.
That's what I was expecting, right?
I was expecting, like, a beef flavor
that maybe I just didn't realize
they had it until they changed it.
But they're just way more flavorful.
I don't know if this is the same with the US right now,
but in the UK, when you buy fries from McDonald's,
they really don't have much flavor to them.
You kind of have to dip them in either ketchup
or barbecue sauce to get any kind of flavor whatsoever.
I think the highest compliment I can pay to these
is that I would happily eat this whole thing
without any dip at all.
I might be speaking too soon,
but I think we need to start the official campaign
to bring back the beef.
These compared to the now McDonald's fries,
these just taste, like, flatter.
They taste like they're missing something.
These guys, oh, man, these are so good.
Harry: These are the only McDonald's fries
anyone under the age of around 35 will have experienced,
and the ingredients list is quite different.
When McDonald's changed the fries recipe in 1990,
it replaced the beef tallow with something
that actually turned out to be worse for you:
trans fats.
They changed the oil recipe again in 2002
to try and eliminate them,
but when this didn't work,
they tried again in 2007.
Now McDonald's says
their fries are completely trans-fat-free,
and it's achieved this through a mixture of canola oil,
corn oil, soybean oil, and hydrogenated soybean oil.
But what's the difference between those last two?
Hydrogenation, as the name suggests,
is the addition of hydrogen.
But when it comes to oils,
that makes a big difference.
Hydrogenation is useful for extending the shelf life of oils
or changing their consistency.
It's how margarine is made.
Effectively, McDonald's has to carry out
a complicated chemical process on its oil
to change something like this
into something resembling beef tallow.
There's one problem, though.
If this reaction isn't perfect,
you end up with trans fats.
These molecules may look extremely similar,
but it makes a huge difference to your health.
Trans fats increase your bad cholesterol
and can massively increase the risk
of heart attacks and strokes.
Yeah, I remember that.
I don't know anything about trans fat,
I don't know what they are, why they're bad,
but it was the talking point for a while.
Should I look it up?
Eh.
We can actually make our own hydrogenated soybean oil,
but I've been told I'm not allowed to do that
because it would involve bringing a tank
of flammable hydrogen into the studio.
Sad.
Yeah, don't do that. Don't bring a tank
of flammable hydrogen into the studio, please.
It has thickened it.
So that's the oils that the fries are cooked in covered,
but there's one other thing that changes them,
and that's the natural beef flavor.
Here's where things get tricky,
because McDonald's will not disclose
what's in their natural beef flavor.
They won't even tell us
if it's meat-based or a vegetarian alternative.
McDonald's previously got in trouble
for not disclosing that they did have beef in them
and had to pay $10 million worth in damages
and issue an apology.
We got our hands on two
very different-looking beef flavorings
to give them a try.
"Beef-flavoring taste test."
Oh, no.
I don't really trust this one,
'cause it's in a very, very blue bottle
and it looks very medicinal,
but I also don't trust this one,
because the label is printed really badly,
and it smells so strongly of something.
I was not able to get beef flavoring
at the time that we shot this video,
and to be honest, I'm glad.
That stuff looks nasty.
This says it's a "unsweetened beef oil,"
but it says, "Take one tablespoon one to four times a day."
I'm not sure who's eating a tablespoon of this.
I don't think I'd even eat a drop of this.
Says it can be mixed with coffee, shakes, or for baking.
This stuff does not smell good. Jeez.
I'm going to, in the name of science,
try one drop of this horrible-smelling beef stuff.
Going to make my hand smell of beef.
[Harry coughing]
Joe: Harry, take it easy, man.
Oh, God.
That's so bad!
What is in that?
[Harry retching]
Holy -- I think he's throwing up!
I think he's throwing up! Harry: Jesus Christ.
Man!
And that goes in these.
What is in that? That's horrible!
The way in which it kind of attacked my throat,
I've never experienced anything like that before.
Oh, that's nasty.
That's going nowhere near our fries.
That leaves us with this one.
I'd say it can't be worse,
but I really don't want to tempt fate.
It smells better, but not good.
That actually does smell quite beefy.
I don't know what that one smells of, but it wasn't beef.
Still doing just a tiny amount.
Joe: Oh, my God. OK. Harry: It's not good.
Doesn't look as offensive as the first one.
My breath is going to smell of beef
for about six weeks after this.
It's not good, but it's much, much better than that one.
So this is going to go in our fries.
This whole area just smells horrific now
thanks to that f---ing oil.
So, there are a few steps here
to get the perfect modern fry.
By the time McDonald's fries arrive at the restaurant,
they've already been on quite a journey.
The first step is to slice them
and put them in an ingredients bath
with the dextrose and the sodium acid pyrophosphate.
This is a preservative that's used
to preserve the color and stop them going brown.
Then they go through a machine called the blancher,
which sprays them with water
at 75 degrees Celsius for 15 minutes
to activate an enzyme called pectin methylesterase
that strengthens the cell walls
and gives the potatoes a firmer texture.
I don't like how science-y these get.
Like, how science-y this one is compared to the first one,
'cause those first fries were awesome.
And now, in order to make it healthy,
they added all this other junk.
I don't even know what he's talking about anymore.
Say when.
I mean, the process looks pretty much the same
as what we did the original recipe,
plus he's just dumping all these chemicals in.
I mean, I can't hate on them,
'cause I'm eating them right now.
Oh, the smell is immediate. Whoa!
So, now we've part-fried them in our blended beefy oil.
At this point, McDonald's would normally freeze them
before sending them out to other McDonald's stores,
where the cooking process would be completed.
Since we've already got the fries,
we're just going to put them straight back in the fryer
for their second cook.
So, here we have it. We have our modern-day
American McDonald's fries.
First impressions: As you can imagine,
they look very much like McDonald's fries.
The color is there, the shape is there,
and they got the kind of texture as well.
Those both look exactly like McDonald's fries.
Harry, you knocked it out of the park with this one, man.
I will say they probably don't smell
as good as the beef tallow fries did.
We did put that substitute beef flavoring in there,
but to me, it doesn't come through as strongly
and it's just not as pleasant.
The last thing to do is of course give them a taste
to see just how accurately McDonald's has been able
to recreate beef without using beef.
I'm gonna be honest with you,
these are night and day. These are completely different.
And in all honesty, I much prefer the beef version.
I get almost no actual beef flavor from these.
You get a little bit on the nose
kind of when you smell them,
but when you actually taste them,
it's just a potato and the salt.
It just feels like McDonald's have gone to
an insane amount of extra steps to create a worse product.
I kind of wish I never tasted these now,
because McDonald's fries to me
will always now be living up to this bar,
and it's a high bar.
I totally agree with Harry.
The beef tallow original recipe,
far eclipse in flavor.
That's not to say that these fries aren't really good.
I mean, I've been snacking on them the whole shoot.
But the beef tallow ones are just incredible.
It's way better.
That said, you guys should still consider yourselves lucky,
because at least you're not eating British McDonald's fries,
which are literally potatoes, salt, and oil,
and taste like sadness.
British fries are OK if you get them
straight out of the fryer and heavily salted,
but as soon as you leave them for a few seconds,
you end up with this pallid soggy mess.
Normally with this show,
we like to say don't try this at home,
but, honestly, if you can get your hands
on some beef tallow, give these fries a try.
Maybe we can convince McDonald's to bring back the beef.
Hey, if you enjoyed this episode, we have others,
like Harry trying to recreate popcorn chicken from KFC.