Can most people taste when fries have been cooked in old cooking oil? It’s a very strong off putting taste too me. Tater tots seems to really suffer if cooked in old oil. I guess because they soak up more of it. But fries too can be ruined.
I had to throw out half my Wendys meal a few nights ago. Not only were the fries reeking of that old oil flavor. But somehow even the burger had this strong old oil taste. I’m not sure how that happened. Maybe they haven’t cleaned the grill in awhile?
Any former fast food employees recall how often they are supposed to change the cooking oil?
Does this bother anyone else? I’d guess at least 1 out of 5 times I’ll get food that tastes of old cooking oil. It’s usually not so bad that I can’t eat it. That recent experience at Wendys was an all time worst.
And let’s not even get started about Buffalo Wings.
I walked into a local buffalo wings type of restaurant, thinking to give them a try (having never yet sampled the same), and the stench of old rancid cooking oil as I walked in the door nearly bowled me over. I managed to refrain from puking as I slithered out, and haven’t been back there since.
Okay, I went and done done it. I got started about Buffalo Wings.
I can complain about a lot of things at fast food restaurants but I’ve never encountered one where the oil seemed rancid or particularly foul tasting. They usually have the equipment that makes it easy to clean, filter, and replace oil. And they’ll have pretty strict standards for hygiene and maintenance. But any one store can be run by incompetents.
From my time under the Golden Arches, I can tell you we tested the oil daily. We would use an eye dropper to pull a sample and compare the color against a test sample. If it was too dark, it got dumped. The french fry and chicken fryers might last a week. We had a dedicated fryer just for filet-o-fish that saw much less use and that one might last two weeks.
The trick is keeping the oil somewhere between “straight out of the bottle” fresh and nasty, black and rancid.
You don’t want totally fresh oil, in that chemically, it’s not ideal for frying. In essence, a sort of soap forms when frying, and it acts sort of in the reverse way that soap does on your hands. Rather than emulsifying the oil layer on your hands and allowing it to be washed away, these soaps in frying oil penetrate the moist layer on the outside of food being fried and allow the oil better contact, producing a drastically better fried product.
It doesn’t take much though- a tablespoon of old oil per cup of new is plenty. Ideally, you’re changing out your oil before it’s nasty- you just save that small proportion of the old oil to give the brand new oil a jump-start on frying capability.
I don’t know how common this is in restaurant kitchens though; their fry oil may well come from the factory with these soaps pre added. I do know that at the Chili’s I worked at in 1989, they filtered the oil every shift, and changed it once a week. (I say oil… it was really shortening and came in huge 18"x18" blocks)
I’m so totally with the op on this!! I hate, hate, hate old rancid cooking oil being used to deep-fry my foods in any restaurant I go to. Yucko ugly nucko! Gross me out and gag me with 100 year old lard!!1!
Thank you, thank you, op, fer bringing this up. Yucksylvania unlimited! Let’s you and me go pit these sumbitches and let them know that we, the mass media socialites are not gonna put up with their bullshit anymore.
ETA : 1 out of 5 times you have to put up with this shit?!?! You are a living saint, op - a verifiable living saint!
They are doing it right. I don’t recall ever getting that old oil taste at McDonalds. Wendys and Sonic seem to be the main ones and only occasionally. I guess every now and then they get a manager or assistant manager that just doesn’t change it frequently.
Oil does pick up flavors from food. I learned that the hard way many years ago. Ordered fried chicken from a catfish place. I don’t like catfish and was their with a group. I needed something to order. They used the same oil to fry their chicken. Fishy tasting chicken.
In most of our locations, it’s exactly eight days between when a fresh batch of oil is poured and when we discard it. A typical JIB has four fryers. Fryer #1 is exclusively for regular French fries, and that’s the only one that gets brand new oil since the regular fries are more susceptible than anything else to picking up flavors from used oil. After two days (during which the fryer is filtered three times), that oil is transferred into fryer #2, which cooks curly fries and finger foods. After another two days and three filterings it goes into fryer #3, which cooks chicken patties, and after another 2 days it goes into fryer #4, which exclusively cooks tacos, which are only cooked in the oldest oil because they damage the oil more than anything else. Two more days and three more filterings, and the oil in fryer #4 is pumped into the waste tank to be recycled into your cologne and perfume and the soap you clean yourself with in the shower every morning.
Thank you for posting the behind the scenes info. I knew that most of the time the cooking oil gets changed regularly. Its interesting to hear just how often they filter it and change it.
Rancid oil bad. New oil, not ideal. Somewhere between the two, as stated above, just right. I’ve encountered the old oil taste before, but it’s a very rare occursence, in my experience.
I knew better than to visit that particular Wendys. It’s next door to a McDonalds. They’ll be a line 7 cars long at McDonalds and zero at Wendys. I don’t know how that particular location is still open. I guess they’ve just given up and don’t even care about basic stuff like changing out the cooking oil.
Sometimes it’s worth driving 10 miles to a better location. The Wendys in Downtown LR is really good. They get a big lunch crowd from the downtown office buildings.
In locations containing both an A&W and a Long John Silver’s, I have noted a tendency for the french fries to taste fishy. I no longer eat at joints that split the building between two franchises…
Keeping in mind this was the late 1980’s, our procedure was to move the oil from fryer to fryer as it aged, and, of course, to dispose of it once it was no longer any good. Fresh oil always went into the French fry fryers, and the oldest oil was always the filet of fish. So, for example, when it was time to dispose of the filet of fish oil, the McChicken oil would be filtered and put into the fish fryer. The fries fryer oil would be filtered and put into the McChicken fryer, and the French fries always had the newest oil. Fresh oil was always used for topping up any of the fryers as needed throughout the day. On days where the filet oil didn’t require replacement, it was filtered too, of course.
The filter was a portable machine that was simply an electric pump with a coffee basket like screen, and a coffee filter like filter, and hoses. I kind of wish I had a miniature version for home use after deep frying.
We would filter the oil daily as well, usually right after the lunch rush broke up. We didn’t shuttle oil down the line from french fry to chicken to filet like you did though. Each fryer was topped up with fresh oil from the jug as needed. All vats used the same color sample to determine if they were too dark to be used again and if they failed, they were simply dumped and refilled with fresh.
This would be been the process used at my local store through most of the 90’s.
The supermarket I go to has a hot foods section and clearly they fry their wings in the same oil as the fish, because the wings taste like fish. I call them “fish wings” (they’re actually not bad; they taste exactly like frogs legs, but it’s certainly a surprise the first time you eat them).
