this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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Bitcoin was a typo, he meant beef tallow
The beef tallow thing is painfully stupid...
I have started to wonder if the fact that adding it back makes it so vegetarians and vegans can no longer eat french fries (that are made with it) had anything to do with that decision... Or was that just an "unexpected bonus" in their minds?
I still don't understand what that was about, like do fries made in tallow taste better? Or at least noticeably different?
Idk if I have the formulation right on this but I imagine it’s a combination of various things:
I can’t speak for the taste. However, the fat used to fry fries does make a difference, as fat is a conveyance of flavour. Many fry recipes call for peanut oil, for example, while many people prefer using a neutral oil like canola to deep fry. I don’t think I know instinctively what the taste of beef tallow is like, but I imagine it’s just… beefy?
Notably different oils have different smoke points, meaning you can fry at higher temperatures for different textures. That’s why duck fat potatoes are a thing, for example.
Malcolm Gladwell famously has a podcast episode on the crusade against beef tallow, where he also replicates mcdonalds fries with beef tallow. But Gladwell is a chud, so fuck all that.
This is so weird to me like you can literally just go out and have fries today and they're great? They're so much better now because there's so many different places that literally just sell fries with various sauces so they have to be in an arms-race for the most delicious kind of sauce and the best fries. Plus everyone now offers sweet potato fries if you're bored of the normal ones. There's never been a better time for fries. When I was a kid fries fucking sucked man, and they had only ketchup.
100%. Nostalgia is a toxic impulse.
People remember fries used to taste better, and they'll attribute it to anything except the maturation of their pallate.
Tallow is saturated, so you can use it longer before it oxidises
Ok but that's an economic argument for the business not an advertisement, like why would I care about this as the consumer of your fries
That might be why they do this, marketing is secondary (and mcd at first didn't market fries as tallow-containing specifically). When done on purpose and currently, i guess it's seed oils thing