What’s so enticing about those French fries cooking around the corner? New research from England finds that the aroma of fries is actually a complex combination of scents including butterscotch, cocoa, onion, flowers, cheese and, yes, ironing boards. Commissioned by—seriously—the Potato Council for National Chip Week, the researchers used an “aroma-meter” (technically a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer) to separate the aroma into its individual compounds, which were then analyzed and recorded.
A new aroma profile was not all the scientists found. The more the chips—ahem, “fries”—were cooked, the more complex they found the aroma to be: Twice-cooked fries often turned up three times the number of “aromatic notes” as batches cooked merely once. No word yet on whether this effect continues for subsequent fryings.
