What’s the difference between regular potato chips and “kettle-cooked” ones?
Kettle-cooked chips use a batch process. This means the chips are washed, sliced, and fried in batches. Other mass-market chips use a continuous process: Raw potatoes go in one end, and a huge conveyor system moves the potatoes down the line, through the cutter, the fryer, the seasoning application, and into their bags—barely touched by human hands. Oil temperatures and times are usually calibrated by computers. This means that potato chips can be made cheaper and with more consistency. But in batch processing, the oil is harder to control. It’s the same phenomenon you experience when you drop raw vegetables into a pot of boiling water: The temperature of the liquid drops and takes a while to heat up again. As a result, there’s some variation in the color of the chips. But these days, consumers don’t necessarily want chips white and predictable, and batch variances have been turned into a marketing advantage. Kettle Chips has built a business on them. I notice that Lay’s Light chips ha
