Crunch!: A History of the Great American Potato Chip

9. Everything Old Is New Again

9 Everything Old Is New Again When I started, people hadn’t seen a hand cooker in this business for fifty years. They’d all say to me: “It’s not done like this any more. You’re crazy.” But because I didn’t have those prejudices , I just tried things. A lot of them worked. Steve Bernard, Cape Cod Potato Chips We went back to basics of what potato chips are all about. Tim Kennedy, Tim’s Cascade Style Potato Chips Not far from Jones Potato Chip Company—some fifty miles east, in the town of Brewster, Ohio—is a different type of Ohio potato chip company. Strictly speaking, it is family owned and uses time-tested methods; but unlike most other Ohio chippers, it is hardly “old time” or “traditional.” The company is Shearer’s. In most chip factories, someone at the end of the production line hand-inspects and picks out bad chips; at Shearer’s, tiny cameras do the job. The optical sorter has perhaps a hundred little lenses on it, about a fourth-inch in diameter; as potato chips are flung from one speedy conveyor onto another, the cameras photograph each one. If something is wrong with a single chip—too dark perhaps—a tiny air tube next to each camera instantaneously blasts that chip with a small puff of air, knocking it off course and directly onto 140 another conveyor, where it can be collected to be sold as a second in the company outlet store. Adjoining the production floor are small laboratory-like rooms. A woman in one room quietly samples chip bags, of every product, every half hour. Shearer’s flushes every chip bag with nitrogen, both to vacuum-pack it and to remove oxygen, which causes chips to deteriorate . To inspect oxygen levels, the woman uses a hypodermic needle, about as thick as the needle on a basketball pump but maybe three times as long. She jabs it into the sealed bag—pfapp!—and the needle produces a nitrogen readout on a meter. The woman puts other finished chip bags into an aquarium-like plastic box. A hydraulic press inside the box slowly mashes the bag under water to determine whether it is leaking. If the bag leaves little bubbles in the water, someone has to tell production that there is an unacceptable level of leakage in that batch, and the packaging machinery will be adjusted accordingly. Another woman grinds chips in a device similar to a Cuisinart and places the sample in a rotary titrator, which measures salt content. She enters the reading for that batch of chips on a chart. Shearer’s has a sludge facility that recovers potato waste and converts it into a powder. The powder is 16 percent protein and ends up in Everything Old Is New Again 141  Eight modern kettle cookers at Shearer’s. (courtesy of Shearer’s Foods, Inc.) cake form. Once a day, ranchers arrive in trucks, collect cakes, and take them to local cattle pens and pastures for feed. It’s said that the cattle come running when they see the trucks. There is also a starch recovery system that utilizes leftover potato starch for a paper producer. A new wastewater treatment plant came online in spring 2004, and they are exploring the feasibility of recycling the water that leaves the plant for use in rinsing incoming potatoes. When I visited in summer 2004, Shearer’s had twelve kettle fryers and six more on order; by spring of 2007, it had grown to twenty-four kettle cookers. Each kettle at Shearer’s—each stainless rectangular tub—is about ten feet square. An axle walks back and forth across the top of every one, with sets of steel paddles, each about the size of a kitchen spatula. The paddle array is like a little Olympic rowing team that hasn’t yet learned to dip smoothly, plunking clumsily into the oil on the way to the other side, keeping the chips from clumping together. Through the transparent oil, metal ten-inch cylinders with regularly spaced holes heat the batch, creating undulating ripples in the liquid, much the way the atmosphere is distorted over a campfire. The kettles are lined up in groups of eight, with conveyors from each bringing the chips to a unifying metal trough; in turn, the trough shuffles the aggregate of chips to the packaging equipment...