Tater to chip is a quick trip

Thanks a picky vacationer for potato chips.

A wealthy guest was eating at a Saratoga, N.Y., resort in the 1850s when he sent his fried potatoes back to the kitchen. They were too thick, he complained.

The offended chef threw a new batch of paper-thin potatoes into boiling oil, fried them to a crisp, and - as a final insult - covered them with salt.

Much to the chef's surprise, the diner loved the new creation, soon dubbed "Saratoga Chips." Nearly 150 years later, potato chips aren't just eaten by the rich, and they're not made one panful at a time.

Today, the Cape Cod potato-chip factory in Massachusetts alone uses 135,000 pounds of potatoes daily to make the snack food. That's 11 giant elephants' worth of potatoes - and 80,000 bags of chips!

The first thing you notice when you visit this factory is the smell of fried potatoes. Workers say their clothes smell like French fries when they go home at night.

Potatoes arrive at the factory in big trucks. They come from fields as far away as Florida and Maine. In winter, they are trucked in from refrigerated storehouses.

Potatoes enter the factory on a conveyor belt called "Spudnik." Once inside, a worker checks the size, temperature, and sugar content of each delivery. Potatoes that have spots or are too small are discarded.

Landing with a thump, the potatoes ride an escalator to their temporary home in a storage bin. When potatoes are needed for production, they ride another conveyor belt to their first stop: the peeler.

A machine with brushes and sandpaper-like rollers removes the skins. A worker cuts up overlarge potatoes so they won't get stuck in the machinery later in the process.

Next, the potatoes are sent to one of three production lines. Each line can process as many as six 50-pound batches of chips at a time. A computer weighs each batch to make sure they are all equal. That ensures even cooking.

Now the potatoes fly through a device shaped like a car tire. It's full of razor-sharp blades that slice the potatoes. Special blades make chips with ridges on them.

Each batch of potatoes is dumped into a bathtub-size vat of hot oil called a "kettle fryer." A worker stirs the potatoes with a tool that looks like a garden rake. Another device in the fryer also moves the potatoes back and forth so they cook evenly.

Potatoes are made mostly of water. When the potatoes hit the hot oil, clouds of steam erupt. A lot of the water in the potatoes evaporates. In fact, it takes four pounds of potatoes to make just one pound of potato chips. That's because so much water is lost in the process.

The fryer automatically stops cooking the potatoes after about six minutes. Now the oil has reached a temperature of around 300 degrees F.

With all that hot oil around, the workers can get hot, too. It feels as though someone has left the oven on in the kitchen all day. Air conditioners run all summer. Even in the winter, big electric fans are needed to keep employees cool.

After they've been cooked, the potatoes are sent to a spinner that removes extra oil. It's like putting the chips in a giant clothes dryer. Periodically, the oil from the kettle fryers and the oil that is spun off the chips is drained and sold to perfume and soapmakers. (They purify it so you don't get soap that smells like French fries.)

Next, the potatoes pass through a tumbler that dumps salt or powdered flavors on the chips. This is where they become barbecue, sour-cream-and-chive, or vinegar-flavored chips. Finally, another worker removes any puffy, undercooked, or damaged chips before the rest go to another room to be bagged and boxed.

Not all potato chips are made the same way. For example, potato chips that come in pop-top cans are made from a dough of potato flakes and water. They are identically shaped and cooked on special forms so they can be stacked.

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