Crunch!: A History of the Great American Potato Chip

1. The Great American Vegetable

1 The Great American Vegetable The houses were all stocked with maize, beans and truffles, spherical roots which are sown and produce a stem with its branches and leaves, and some flowers, although few, of a soft purple colour; and to the roots of this same plant, which is about three palms high, they are attached under the earth, and the size of an egg more or less, some round and some elongated ; they are white and purple and yellow, floury roots of good flavour, a delicacy to the Indians and a dainty dish even for the Spaniards. Juan de Castellanos, 1601 A man surveys an undulating green field that stretches almost as far as the eye can see—a carpet of eighteen-inch-high plants. A little farther away, the pattern is broken by a different variety of plant, this one dotted with millions of tiny snow-white flowers. The man has fluffy white hair and eyes that are the color of baby-blue marbles. Over six feet tall, he is solidly built. He has the body of a working man—a truck driver, a mechanic, a farmer. A potato farmer. Like his father and grandfather, Don Ramseyer has grown chipping potatoes his entire life. For three generations, the Ramseyer potato farm, an oasis of green on a rolling plain wedged between the suburbanizing towns of Wooster and Smithville, Ohio, has 3 produced potatoes for potato chip factories. Now it is one of the last chipping potato farms left in Ohio. Chipping potatoes are different from potatoes used for baking and salads. Because potatoes are mostly water, the act of frying them in hot oil leaves little potato matter when the water evaporates. In the early days, potato chip makers (called “chippers” in the business) tried the same varieties that we use for cooking at home—Russets, Katahdins, Irish Cobblers. But many of these yielded poorly, sometimes as little as 22 percent—twenty-two pounds of chips from one hundred pounds of raw potatoes. Today, chippers use modern varieties that can yield 30 percent or higher. These varieties have what chippers call high specific gravity—high dry-matter content. Ramseyer grows two of the these varieties. One variety, Snowden— the one with white flowers in his field—is grown specifically for winter storage. Storage is important for the chip industry because fresh potatoes simply cannot be found from November to March. Chip factories— especially large ones like those of Frito-Lay, Wise, Herr’s, and Utz— demand a product that is consistent the year round, a chip that tastes and looks the same all the time. Ramseyer makes his living from potatoes that chippers can use during the winter months. “A problem we have with the Snowdens,” says Ramseyer, “is stem end discoloration. The ideal thing is for them to die naturally, and then the chip quality is just excellent. If they’re still green and growing and you’re running out of time; you have to chemically kill them. But sometimes near the stem end there’s a deposit of sugar that hasn’t naturally tapped out, and it stays there—and when you chip ’em, there’s a brown spot from the sugar.” Stem end discoloration is only one of many vagaries that potato growers and chippers have to deal with. Heat, internal necrosis, greening , sunscald, vascular browning, pressure bruises from storage, scabs, late blight, tuber rot, ring rot, mechanical injury, hollow heart, freezing . . . the list goes on and on. A major consideration in the quality of storage potatoes like Snowdens is heat. By winter, Ramseyer’s winter storage barn will be loaded almost to the ceiling with four-foot-square wooden crates full of Snowdens. If the temperature is too low, the starch in the potatoes turns to sugar, yielding a brown chip. But if the temperature is too high, 4 The Great American Vegetable  depending on the maturity of potatoes when harvested, sugars can also accumulate, resulting in a brown chip. Either temperature extreme results in what consumers like you and me usually call a “burnt” potato chip. “Ideally, you keep it at fifty degrees,” Ramseyer says. “One way to disperse that brown buildup on the Snowdens is to increase the heat in the storage barn.” But when that happens, the potatoes will start to sprout, and Ramseyer will be forced to use a sprout inhibitor. “Once we cranked it...