Food Theory: I Made The World's LOUDEST Chip!

Hello, welcome to the kitchen, we are surrounded by root vegetables and a lot of fries, oh my God, it's time, my friends, the bowl that is extra large is coming towards you, wait, oh oh, the big one is the one you throw away and then run through the little lines they throw the pigskin like it was and then they and then sometimes they kick the pigskin and then you pay attention when the commercials come on and then they get brain injuries it's not a great situation but You know how good it is to consume loud snacks, that's true because people scream and you can eat a lot of

chip

s, but you want to eat the crunchiest one because you know you have to drown out the sound of everything around you, yes, everyone.

There are cheers and screams and there are sports balls and commercials and sometimes you just want to hear your own crunch, so why not design the crunchiest

chip

humanly possible to annoy everyone around you? Yeah, I think that's basically what it's all about, hello foreigner, Internet, welcome to

food

theory

. the show that has some real stuff going on, I don't know if you know this, but there's a big football game coming up and people tend to get a little excited about one that I can't name for legal reasons, though, as I think. We all know that the real fun of watching any type of sports ball is having an excuse to consume half your body weight and snack like it's a big old plate of snacks.

I guess you could call it a Super Bowl full of snacks that then begs the question, what do you fill that Super Bowl of snacks with? I mean, sure you could go with the standard, safe chips and Rao dip, the Southern chicharrones option, or Food World's forgotten kiddie pretzel sticks or you could go for ham at that Super Bowl. Bowl creating the

loudest

chip ever

made

inside a kitchen, a chip that's like biting into a stable of fireworks right there, a chip that's so loud it makes your neighbors cover their ears because, let's be honest, nothing is louder fun than meeting up with your friends to watch something on the big screen only to then proceed to annoy them with the sounds of your obnoxious creaks, this episode is an apology to anyone with misophonia, that's right, theorists right, today we're looking at what it takes to fry the crispiest ones. chip for all your snacking needs, this episode was suggested during our generic

food

s episode by one of you in the comments by Joy Das who suggested that we research, test and then create the chip with the

loudest

crunch possible, how do you would do? of potato corn something else what cooking method would we need to use in a pot baked cooked fried how strongly could we make a single chip crispy so that my friends is exactly what we are doing in the kitchen today? chewing on a bunch of store brand chips to measure their Crunch and hopefully we'll see what patterns emerge from the data there, we'll be able to take that information and apply it to our own rounds of experiments to try and develop a perfect, singular chip. , one chip to rule them all, so how strong is too strong, my friends, we'll have to wait and see what breaks my eardrums or my stomach first.

Say goodbye to all those New Year's resolutions about eating healthier. Matt, first thing. First, why are people attracted to crunchy foods? What is its appeal? It's actually an interesting question that science hasn't looked at much. My personal hypothesis is that it involves another sense in the eating process. If you think about it, foods activate four. with our five senses we see food pretty reliably, we feel food in our mouth, we can smell food and obviously taste it, but hearing food, yeah, that's not something you normally hear and you can't normally hear. You hear a steak or think about the sounds that make your mouth water: the snap of biting into an apple, the fizzy pour of soda into a glass, the sizzle of a steak on the grill, and of course, the crunch of a French fry. when they crush it. between our teeth we suddenly activate all five senses in the eating experience, which gives us positive and satisfying feedback and well, that's just my personal hypothesis.

I was able to find a study from the University of Oxford that looks at the relationship between sound and taste. Dr. Charles Spence had a small sample of 20 patients bite into 180 Pringles while adjusting the level of the crunch playing on their headphones. From there, the subjects were asked to rate the freshness of the fries and, although all the fries were exactly the same, the same ones who had the crunch at a higher volume were rated as fresher and, again, this has a lot meaning when you think about food. World Crunchy is often associated with fresh, crisp lettuce.

Crispy apples, grapes that burst in your mouth, all indicate something at the peak of freshness, something that your body is trained to want to consume to a certain extent, because let's just say there are definitely diminishing returns on that crunch factor, since I'm about to find out very quickly, oh, I need, I desperately need water, my fingers have literally wrinkled after all the salt I just consumed. I thought after being on the internet for 10 years you could handle the salt. Look how people tell me I'm salty all the time, not as salty as these chips. I'll tell you what, oh and uh, I didn't know where to put this in this script as a whole, but apparently Doritos was thinking about making a version of their classic chips with less crunch because they thought it would be more specifically targeted to women.

This is a clip from episode 316 of Freakonomics radio where they interviewed the CEO of PepsiCo, they watch a lot of young people eat the fries, they love their Doritos and you know, they lick their fingers with great women from Glee. I think they would love to do the same. but they don't like to crunch too loudly in public, so is there a male and female version of chips that you are playing with or not? Yes, we are looking at it and we are preparing to launch it. soon there will be a lot of them for women, you know, with a low crunch, the full flavor profile and not so much flavor sticking to your fingers, and how do you put it in the bag you know?

Because women should be seen and not heard crunching their fries or licking their fingers. Apparently that's a big mistake by PepsiCo, maybe there's a reason we haven't seen these products come to market anyway. Getting back to today's experiment, our first step in creating the crispiest chip ever was to test a bunch of different brands and see what features, if any, they had. They were shared among the loudest ones, so we set up the old decibel meter in the kitchen and started testing. Oh, don't you normally keep your decibel meter in the kitchen? You don't have any decimal meter.

I guess I know. What I'm going to give you for the holidays At first it all started out fun. I hadn't had fries in a long time, so it was like a reunion with a forgotten old friend did the body good after crispy fries, but I quickly remembered. Why I abandoned it in the first place. I like food

theory

sessions because they make me never want to eat that particular food again. Yes, we have so much of a food in such a short time that I never want to make it again. Try it again if you need me after today's session.

I'll be on the treadmill for the next week. It's definitely something too good for our test. We obviously collected potato chips, but we tried to get a sample of other types of chips. well-blended vegetable chips popcorn chips, as well as chips that represent a different preparation Styles such as boiled versus fried versus baked According to Connecticut-based audiologist Nathan Bowman, the average noise level of someone chewing on a potato chip It should be between 25 and 35 decibels but in our testing we found the number to be much higher than that 59.68. After averaging five good abs for each of 17 different brands of chips, we got our numbers, mostly all fell in a similar range of 55 to 65 decibels, but there were some very clear trends that stood out among the kings of crunch.

First, our top two spots were for Exotic Vegetable Chips, Simple Truth and Terra Original Chips which were a mix of Taro Sweet Potato and Cassava, yes it's pronounced Yuka. Look. came up, it was also a surprise for me, yes, Yosi, our audio guy, mentioned it thanks for taking care of me. Yosi Yuka. I always thought it was Yucca, you learn something new every day anyway. Then I did some research and found a comment. thread discussing how Terra chips are abnormally hard and crunchy, meaning we were clearly on the right track and that our experiment aligned with other people's anecdotal evidence about things the next two points were potato chips, but specifically potatoes boiler-cooked fries.

It meant I needed to do some research on kettle chips, as at the time all I knew about them was that they're the kind you buy when you want to have cuts on the roof of your mouth with Harold McGee, an author who writes about chemistry. of Food Science and Cooking explains that the kettle method is actually a slower way to fry these things in batches. As each new batch of potatoes is added to the fryer, the temperature of the oil decreases each time, as a result, the potatoes take a little longer to cook. cook giving the remaining starch and potatoes time to absorb the moisture and dissolve before the potato finishes frying, this results in a thicker, sturdier chip, so it seemed like we had our two main variables that were driving the crunch general knowledge of exotic roots and a boiler cooking process.

It's also worth noting that, of all the potato chips I tried, the potato-based Pringles actually recorded the least loud crunch, which is why Pringles aren't

made

from sliced ​​potatoes like most other chips, but which are made from dried potato flakes that are then shaped by machine. Back to that characteristic chip shape as such, while they certainly taste great and are incredibly consistent in colour, shape and flavour, the fact that they have already been cut and reshaped diminishes the overall crunch. I was also surprised to see how poorly corn tortilla chips performed. It's listed on the low to middle end of the pack, but after some research I discovered that the crunch of a chip is ultimately decided by the moisture content before frying, when something is dropped into boiling oil. , whether it's a potato. sliced ​​pork skin or a bit of tortilla the moisture in each individual cell the chip vaporizes immediately this is the bubbling you see every time you drop something in a fryer this is what gives you that tough outer crust that makes frying is so delicious and satisfying in essence, they are dehydrating the chip from there, the oil rushes to fill the space left by the water.

The more moisture that is available before frying, the longer the chip can be in the fryer and the crispier the final product will be, will be the problem for many. Tortilla chips are baked before being fried, meaning they start from a place with less moisture rather than something like, say, a slice of potato or a slice of vegetables. In this initial experimentation, 1.8 inches thick seemed to be the ideal size for a chip. Anything thinner seems to cook too quickly and wasn't solid enough to create a nice solid chip, so in short we should eat it like a potato or something else. tuber that was cooked Kettle style to a medium thickness of 1 8, but which tuber and how to best prepare it was time for the next phase of data collection, like the opening of Iron Chef, where it takes like the raw pepper.

I want to spit that out first, we wanted to test which preparation method would offer the best results. All of the online recipes suggest soaking or rinsing the potatoes to remove excess starch before frying, but they all suggest different ways to do it, so three batches of Russet Potatoes are used. We created three groups based on the most popular recommendations of those online recipes. Soak the potatoes in water, soak them in a mixture of water and vinegar and partially boil or partially boil the potatoes, they are not crispy but are still limp. I know you're going to eat that stop, you're hungry, maybe I need calories.

We have 10 bags of chips in there, that's a good point. Thank you, thank you for mentioning that after soaking the first two groups for 25 minutes and Par. As the third boiled, we dumped small batches of potatoes into the deep fryer at 302 degrees Fahrenheit. We specifically chose to use safflower oil in the fryer because that's what showed up on all the websites of the top four crispy fry competitors from the first round and then the fresh cut fries fly. directly into a vat of a hot, bubbling special oil that is low in saturated fat, we used a very specific type of safflower oil because of its neutral flavor, but just because I used it didn't mean thatknew what he was doing at that moment.

What is safflower? Have I ever seen a safflower in my life? Yes, past matpat, safflower is indeed a flower, it's actually part of the sunflower family, but it looks more like a small thistle. The reason many restaurants and chip makers use safflower oil for frying is because it has a higher smoke point than other commonly used oils such as sunflower and canola. A smoke point is the temperature at which fat begins to smoke, so in general, safflower oil produces a more stable and safer cooking experience, to everyone's surprise, after salting and cooling it is three. batches, it was immediately clear that parboiling produced the loudest crunch, everyone gave a good showing, honestly, but the winner is, I mean, by several decibels, what parboiling seems to be, yeah, I was going to say, parboiling seems to be the way forward, it feels more resilient.

It feels crispier in the mouth even though they were all prepared exactly the same way, so on average, parboiling produces the crispiest of the three preparation methods. Now the question is which vegetable will actually give the crispiest result. Even Ollie agreed. I mean, here's one more we have to try. What do you think that is on the crunchy scale? Super crispy. Well I must say that if you are ever thinking of making salt and vinegar chips, just let the potatoes soak in a light vinegar mixture before boiling, that's all you need to do and they end up delicious.

From there, it was time for our finale. trying all the different vegetables we could find using everything we had learned so far we selected eight different tubers two varieties of potatoes yams sweet potatoes beets celery root kohlrabi and turnips we sliced ​​we parboiled we heated the safflower oil to 300 degrees and then we threw them all in to the fryer, batch by batch, Kettle style once they were out. Stephanie struggled to get into position to try to get images of the decibel meter. Oh, yesterday I did a Chloe Tang workout with all grace and speed. YouTube is a young man. man's game and from there it was time for the final test.

We will take three samples of each type of Chip. Let's act. So what we're going to do is take three samples of each of our different ones. types of chips from there Stephanie will record the maximum decibels that she hears the meter will take the average and from there we will determine what the ultimate crispy chip is ready, set, set, great, let's do this, let's start with the basics, let's do it. we have our golden potato and our russet, so let's start with some golden potato first and foremost, the maximum we're getting is like 63. There I'll say they feel a little soggy, that's the golden potato about 63.

Next one Russet potato is now 64. Okay, so potatoes, yeah, and okay, it doesn't look very good, I guess now let's move on to what we have, okay, sweet potato, these guys look promising, oh look how beautiful they are , it's wild when you look through 59. yam, I am what I am and that's all I'm 58. I'm not saying that, this one feels soft, what do we do next? kohlrabi kohlrabi here we go oh 64.5 that was good go up 57.8 next up we're on to our last two competitors, celery and beets, by the way, it's celery root, not like the green stuff you get at the store 62.4 I actually like the beet chips, so I'm rooting for these guys 57.2 and the final verdict, yeah, we made some delicious chips that are said it's a beautiful chip and they're very tasty.

I love these chips, they are actually delicious, except maybe for the celery root, so it has a bit of a celery flavor on the back, it's a bit like an oily salad, it's strange yeah. Yeah, hey, you know you like to lose calories when you chew celery. This isn't it, but our decibel readings can surpass the crunch factor of store-bought brands. We were now in the pocket along with everyone else's decibel readings, but our optimizations were crunchy. They weren't enough to topple the leader of horror chips, don't get me wrong, our concoctions tasted delicious and had a solid crunch, but was the eardrum-splitting supersonic crunch what I was expecting?

No, not at all. I wanted things that could be heard across the street, not just down the hall, so the question of who is our winner so far, yeah, it's a pretty close tie, honestly, which It makes sense because we prepare them all very similarly, but I actually think the original golden potato is a strong contender and maybe a little bit on the yam side, maybe a little bit of yam, it's interesting. I wonder if thicker might have been a little better because right now I feel like I can mash them up really easily. I think if there was a little more resistance. and with a little more thickness in the chip, you would hear more of that crunching sound rather than the collapse that seems to be happening at the end, our Russet fries came out on top by a very small margin, but they were actually all Honestly, Sitting in that 55 to 60 decibel range, I think we managed to maximize the crunch of the fries we made, but maybe making a few more rounds a little thicker or holding them a little longer or frying them twice could have made a difference.

And there you have it, theorists, home fries and all the knowledge you need to maximize the crunch. As of now, the Terra chips are our undisputed crunch champion, but I have a feeling they'll be back. I am learning. growing getting better and hey, I highly recommend you try this experiment for yourself in your own kitchen. It's not that hard to make and I must admit it makes you feel like a legit chef in the kitchen. I never thought I'd make French fries. for me and I must say that the new chips eliminate anything you get in the store, at least the first couple handfuls, also if you have any recommendations for us to try in the next round of experiments to take down Terra, let me know now if you will excuse me , I need to drink so much water that it was too much salt and too much oil for one day.

I'll be on the treadmill for quite a while, but hey, we've talked a lot today about salty things, but the salt level. that we covered is nothing compared to the salty taste of the team theorists without their morning coffee, especially editor-in-chief Dan without his morning coffee, there are actually coffees, there are at least three in the first hour, but thanks to our sponsor for today's episode, it sped up my meetings with Dan and the others are decidedly less salty because the coffee arrives quickly and directly to their doors. Cometeer is a smarter, faster way to brew barista quality coffee because it's brewed using science and you know all of us here at the channel are staunch believers in the power of science to improve the way we eat and drink things cometeer embodies.

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