Excerpts from the Innovation Economy blog.
Producing a crispy french fry without a deep fryer is one of the Holy Grails of food science. This month, a Cambridge research company, DuraFizz, invited me to taste their latest project, fresh from the oven.
I met with founder David Soane, formerly a tenured chemical engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley; Dan Jacques, a former Ocean Spray executive; and Lauren Fortin, a University of Massachusetts-trained food scientist.
It’s tough to bake potatoes and achieve anything like a proper french fry texture, Fortin explained. And once you dunk a potato in hot oil, it gets fattening fast.
What DuraFizz has been developing is a healthy fry that’s super-crispy but baked in an oven. The customers they have in mind aren’t just restaurant chains and frozen food producers, but also schools and military installations. The coating they have developed, called Oh So Crisp, uses starches and flours from corn, rice, and potatoes, which form a layer around the potato.
“The ingredients are all natural,’’ Fortin said, and the fries are gluten-free.
Soane says the coating works by creating a stiff, ridgy layer that your tongue and teeth perceive as crispiness, along with pores that allow the moisture inside the potato to escape to avoid sogginess. Even when you reheat the fries in a microwave, Soane says, they stay crispy.
“And there are no new ingredients in the coating - nothing that would require FDA review,’’ he said.
DuraFizz is working with Russet House, a Canadian company that produces sweet potato fries for restaurants and grocery chains like Trader Joe’s, on production tests of Oh So Crisp.
Fortin whipped up two samples in a convection oven, baking them at 400 degrees for 10 minutes. I tried them sans ketchup.
Both the white and sweet potato fries had a crunchy coating. On the white potato fries, the coating was so assertive it overwhelmed the potato filling. For that reason, I preferred the sweet potato variation, which had been cut thicker. It had a light, pillowy interior.
But while Oh So Crisp conferred a substantial crunch, it had a strange stickiness, adhering to my tongue and teeth in a way you don’t expect from a french fry, a bit like a candy coating would.
Fortin said they are working on a way to apply a thinner coating more evenly, eliminating the problem. If a traditional, well-made fry is an A (and healthfulness isn’t factored in), I’d grade DuraFizz’s sweet potato fries a solid B, and the white potato fries C-plus.
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