You soon may be able to enjoy french fries with a little less guilt about your health.
Researchers at the University of Illinois have reportedly developed a method for cooking fries that maintains their crispiness and taste while using less oil.
The answer, apparently, is to use a microwave alongside frying.
According to the researchers, combining traditional frying with microwave use cooks the fries without the need for as much oil, allowing diners to enjoy them without consuming as much fat.
The findings were published in Current Research in Food Science and The Journal of Food Science.
While creating the healthier fry may seem like an odd thing for scientists to focus on, the fact of the matter is that — despite their high levels of fat — people are going to eat french fries. Rather than hoping that our willpower to not indulge wins the day, the researchers instead have sought a means for making fries less harmful.
“Consumers want healthy foods, but at the time of purchase, cravings often prevail,” Pawan Singh Takhar, the author of one of the studies, said, according to WIRED. “The high oil content adds flavor, but it also contains a lot of energy and calories.”
Frying food is typically seen as a less healthy way of cooking because the method doesn’t stop fats from frying oils from entering the actual food product.
Early in the frying process, the water in the pores of potatoes keeps the oil from entering the fry. But as cooking goes on, the water evaporates, allowing an entry point for the oil.
Unlike frying, which cooks from the outside in, microwaving cooks from the inside out. But microwaving fries without any other means of cooking wouldn’t give them the crispiness people typically associate with fries.
“If only microwaving is used, the food turns out mushy,” Takhar noted.
Instead, the researchers experimented with both frying and microwaving. They determined a way to heat the fries traditionally just enough to achieve the crispy outside before moving the food into a custom-built microwave to complete the cooking process.
“We propose to combine the two methods in the same device. Traditional heating maintains crispness, while microwave heating reduces oil consumption,” the study says.
According to the researchers, the method should produce fries that taste like fries, maintain their texture and feel, but critically have soaked up less oil, and thus less fat.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, custom-built french fry microwave fryers aren’t necessarily a kitchen appliance that is readily available, so it may be some time before fry lovers concerned with their health can replicate the experiment in their own homes.