I still owe you all the nutritionals on the Egg and Eggplant and the soy BLT. I’ll get those up soon, but to tide you over, here are the french fries.
We sent out a couple samples of our fries, cut, soaked, drained, fried, salted just as we always do. Besides being cut on the truck, our fries have a few other unusual qualities. When Rolando and I got started trying to figure out how to make french fries we knew they weren’t going to be frozen. Most fries are called “Sysco fries” in the industry, Sysco is a large foodservice supplier.
We started with the methods most folks use (think Five Guys, good French Bistros). This involves par cooking the potato. We’d heard certain people spend a lot of time bragging about their oil, so we thought that cracking this thing was going to be all about finding the right oil.
We found instead that, like almost everything, it’s about the starting ingredients. In this case: the potato. In my opinion oil matters very little. First you need to get the best potato, then the question is how fresh/ how do you cut, after that temperature and time, finally, very last on the list is oil.
I remembered some of my favorite fries of all time were from a street vendor in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The funny thing was, as I thought about it, he cut them there and didn’t par cook the fries. Par cooking means cooking at a lower temperature before a later cooking phase. In the case of fries potatoes are often par cooked with a low temperature oil. After this phase they are cooked through and limp and oily. Then later (sometimes 20 minutes, sometimes an hour) they are cooked at a higher temperature. This results in a well cooked potato that is very crispy on the outside.
We followed the lead of the Halifax street vendor. Our fries are not par cooked. We cook them once at a high temperature. I suspected this meant that the fries would have less oil in them at the end, and the tests prove that out. Theory holds that the steam coming out of the potatoes holds the oil at bay. In N Out also cooks once, but they cook at a very low temperature for a very long time. This has the opposite effect. Their fries are saturated with oil.
Clover fries:
400 kcal
19 g fat
6 g protein
50 g carbohydrates
UPDATE: I was getting a ton of flak for the graph format. For the record, It’s not “wrong” to show a graph with a Y-axis minimum other than zero. It’s not super common in engineering etc., but in the business world it’s very common when differences between measurements vary by less than 10 or 20% of the total (making it hard to see the difference on a zero axis).
That said, I can see that the previous chart was misleading. In my defense, I wasn’t meaning to mislead anybody! I was giving this new graphing software: OmniGraphSketcher a spin. If you can get past the name it’s pretty cool software. Basically does everything I always wanted graphing software to do, except that it doesn’t support a bunch of advanced stuff I’d like. I went with their default representation of the data. Changed now for clarity.
[img src="webkit-fake-url://78409E31-9E91-4BB8-976F-0B59F131CC51/image.tiff" alt="" /] may not be doing what you want. Was that supposed to be a picture of the nutritional information?
But thank you for posting this. It helps to feel good about what I’m eating.
Interesting graph showing the competitors fat content as 5-8 times that of Clover. I love the food, but think a more realistic representation of fat differential would have the Y-Axis on a 0-23 scale.
Love the blog. Good luck with the restaurant
I know that since you hail from MIT you are familiar with the display of quantitative information. Might I suggest in the interest of clarity that you show the above graph (vendor.vs.fat content) with the Y-axis starting at zero. With your graph as shown, the casual viewer might be lead to believe that McD’s fries have 5 – 10 times more fat, when in fact it is only approximately 1.2x.
I have no problem with you stating that your fries are 10x more delicious. I will vouch for that.
The Y axis of that graph should really start at zero to accurately reflect the differences.
Thanks for posting this! Another comparison are the fries from 5 guys: You can get the info here: http://www.fiveguys.net/files/files/NutritionalInfo_2009.pdf
Initial specs: 360 kcals for 5oz serving (you gotta do some ratios to come up wit this) with 17.4g of fat. A little bit better than you guys, but definitely not as tasty!
I love those fries in Halifax! Now that you mention it your fries do bear a good resemblance, maybe cut smaller? Nice work.
I applaud you and your concept.
I’ve eaten at the MIT location several times and yes…I do work for Sysco.
The seiten(sp?) BLT is a winner
If you want the best fresh fried potatoes the Cardinal rule is to use the potato with the lowest moisture (or highest solids)
Canadian / East Coast / P.E.I. will never (95% of the year) give you better potatoes than a Russet Burbank from Idaho/Oregon or Washington state.
Yes, you’ll pay more up front but you’ll end up with a better flavor, texture and appearence and your oil will last longer because it’s not getting killed evaporating all the water first.
Personally I would reccomend using 100% peanut oil. It has a higher smoke point and the iodine levels are the lowest. Don’t worry about peanut/nut allergies. Peanut oil does not have any of the protein allergens and anyone who really has a nut allergy knows this and won’t be offended that you use it. I saw in a previous post that you use the other “big distributer” U.S. Foodservice. I’ve been a rep with Sysco for over 20 years and if your not already speaking with someone at Sysco I’d love to take you on as a client. I run my 1984 diesel wagon on veg oil if you need a home for you used oil. I can pick it up weekly.
Respectfully
Michael Cohen
Michael –
Thanks for your note. We’re pretty specific about our fries. I know we’re breaking a lot of rules with them (check some of our fry posts). But We think they taste awesome.
Did the soy BLT nutritionals ever go up? I’m not finding it…
Sorry, they didn’t. I’m behind on a bunch of things right now.
A couple of restaurants in northern Virginia that fry their fries in olive oil:
http://www.elevationburger.com/EB.php
http://www.burgerseven.com/
Any chance of posting stats that distinguish between saturated and non-saturated fats? It’s the former that’s (date I say?) the killer. Looking over your ingredient lists it would appear that in at least some of the cases the fat levels you’re reporting should be coming chiefly from non-saturated fats, rather than from the bad boys.
11 points plus on weight watchers if anyone is tracking
Hey! I love your fries but I often come to clover alone and the portion is just too big for me. Any way a 1/2 portion could be added to the menu? Or a children’s portion that is 1/2 the amount and 1/2 the price? I would buy them.
What is the salt content of your fries?
We add salt to taste, so each batch is going to be a little bit different. Rolando’s educated guess is about 1/8 teaspoon per order.
Really funny story. We’ve never gotten this question before, so I was acting out a person shaking fries into a fry bowl to try to see how many shakes of the salt-shaker goes into each order. Everyone thought I looked pretty funny.
I recently moved to Harvard Square and couldn’t find any organic food restaurants. Then, a friend took me to Clover. Loved it! Later, I read there food is organic. LOVED it even more! Went back again yesterday and grabbed the Egg & Egg White and the Hibiscus drink. All I have to say is OMG!!! It is heavenly! I’m about to go back again today and grab some more!!! YUMMMMM!!! YUMMMMM!!!! The people that work there are super nice too. I’d never had Hibiscus tea/drink before so they had me sample it. I think that’s my new favorite drink! Oh and they also gave me a carton of french fries to try! Can’t beat AMAZING TASTING FOOD, Organic and healthy, and a friendly staff!
Glad you had a good time. I guarantee we’ll screw something up at some point. So tell us what you don’t like too : )