Alternative names – Chips, finger chips, fries, frites, hot chips, steak fries, potato wedges, wedges.
French fries, or simply fries (North American English), chips (British and Commonwealth English, Hiberno-English), finger chips (Indian English), or french-fried potatoes, are batonnet or allumette-cut deep-fried potatoes.
Course – Side dish or snack, rarely as a main dish
Place of origin – Belgium or France (disputed)
Serving temperature – Hot
Main ingredients –
Potatoes
Oil
Variations – Curly fries, shoestring fries, steak fries, sweet potato fries, Chili cheese fries, poutine
Other information – Often served with salt and a side of ketchup, mayonnaise, vinegar, barbecue sauce, or other sauce
Health aspects –
French fries primarily contain carbohydrates (mostly in the form of starch) and protein from the potato, and fat absorbed during the deep-frying process. Salt, which contains sodium, is almost always applied as a surface seasoning. For example, a large serving of french fries at McDonald’s in the United States is 154 grams. The 510 calories come from 66 g of carbohydrates, 24 g of fat, 7 g of protein and 350 mg of sodium.
Experts have criticized french fries for being very unhealthy. According to Jonathan Bonnet, MD, in a TIME magazine article, “fries are nutritionally unrecognizable from a spud” because they “involve frying, salting, and removing one of the healthiest parts of the potato: the skin, where many of the nutrients and fiber are found.” Kristin Kirkpatrick, RD, calls french fries “…an extremely starchy vegetable dipped in a fryer that then loads on the unhealthy fat, and what you have left is a food that has no nutritional redeeming value in it at all.” David Katz, MD states that “French fries are often the super-fatty side dish to a burger—and both are often used as vehicles for things like sugar-laced ketchup and fatty mayo.”
Frying french fries in beef tallow, lard, or other animal fats adds saturated fat to the diet. Replacing animal fats with tropical vegetable oils, such as palm oil, simply substitutes one saturated fat for another. For many years partially hydrogenated vegetable oils were used as a means of avoiding cholesterol and reducing saturated fatty acid content, but in time the trans fat content of these oils was perceived as contributing to cardiovascular disease. Starting in 2008, many restaurant chains and manufacturers of pre-cooked frozen french fries for home reheating phased out trans fat containing vegetable oils.
French fries contain some of the highest levels of acrylamides of any foodstuff, and experts have raised concerns about the effects of acrylamides on human According to the American Cancer Society, it is not clear as of 2013 whether acrylamide consumption affects people’s risk of getting cancer. A meta-analysis indicated that dietary acrylamide is not related to the risk of most common cancers, but could not exclude a modest association for kidney, endometrial or ovarian cancers. A lower-fat method for producing a French fry-like product is to coat “Frenched” or wedge potatoes in oil and spices/flavoring before baking them. The temperature will be lower compared to deep frying, and which also reduces acrylamide formation.
First avaliable –
The first commercially available chips in the UK were sold by Mrs. ‘Granny’ Duce in one of the West Riding towns in 1854. A blue plaque in Oldham marks the origin of the fish-and-chip shop, and thus the start of the fast food industry in Britain. In Scotland, chips were first sold in Dundee: “in the 1870s, that glory of British gastronomy – the chip – was first sold by Belgian immigrant Edward De Gernier in the city’s Greenmarket”. In Ireland the first chip shop was “opened by Giuseppe Cervi”, an Italian immigrant, “who arrived there in the 1880s”. It is estimated that in the UK, 80% of households buy frozen chips each year.