Pringles are one of the most iconic snack foods ever invented. A simple potato chip, curved in an unusual way stacked into one of the world’s most recognizable containers. Everyone loves digging into a cylinder of Pringles, unless your hands are too big to really fit into the container, and then you’re stuck.
It’s easy to call Pringles a potato chip, but that’s not an entirely accurate term for what they are. Surprisingly, Pringles are only partly potato and are actually composed of many different ingredients to create one perfectly textured salty snack. However, it all begins with potatoes.
Potatoes are first washed in huge vats to remove dirt and debris and keep the rest of the process sanitary. They are then rolled in a large drum-like machine lined with abrasive sides to remove the potato skin. After the potatoes have had their skins removed, they’re put through a machine in which they are blanched.
Blanching is a process of briefly submerging a vegetable into boiling water and then placing it into cold water as a sort of shock treatment, softening its flesh and deactivating enzymes that could ruin the texture of the final product.
Following blanching, the potatoes go to a unique cutting machine shaped like a vertical loop, similar to the loop tracks used by Hot Wheels car tracks in the 1990s. The spinning “track” features a small gap affixed with a very fine blade that thinly slices the potatoes as they’re flung to the top of the track by centrifugal force. This rotating track is an absolute monster and capable of spinning up to 1,200 revolutions per minute, delivering some serious power as it rapidly flings the potatoes into the blade.
As the strips are cut from the potatoes, a second set of blades along the conveyor then slices the strips into small cubes. The more the potatoes are processed at this point, the easier it is to facilitate the following steps.
After cutting, the cubes are sent onto another line where they are separated by vibration. They need to be separated to ensure they cook uniformly and are free of any blemishes or damage. The cubes are first boiled for about two minutes, then run through a steam cooking machine at 345 degrees Fahrenheit. After cooking, the potatoes are mashed in a huge mixing vat, creating a gigantic bin of potato mash that is then spread over a series of drum dryers to create what is essentially a massive sheet of potato pasta. The drum dryers rotate to keep the sheets uniform while pulling out moisture and preserving the flavor. These sheets are then milled to harvest potato flakes that are the foundation of every Pringle.
If you’ve ever looked at the ingredients on a Pringles can and wondered why a potato chip needs so many additives, you’re about to find out. In order to harness the classic texture you expect from a Pringle, it must be mixed with several ingredients including water, corn starch, wheat starch, rice flour and maltodextrin. Maltodextrin is used as a filler to replace fat and sugar as a binding agent and to preserve the food and give it a longer shelf life.
These ingredients create Pringle dough, which is spread across a conveyor in uniform amounts before being crushed by a press that generates four tons of pressure and makes the dough appear like a giant sheet.
This sheet is continuously fed through a rolling cutter that presses roughly Pringle-sized oval shapes out of the dough. This process results in a big sheet of dough with a bunch of holes in it, which isn’t very practical when trying to minimize waste, so the dough that didn’t “make the cut” is reformed and recycled to be cut again until it is entirely used up.
The dough ovals are fed into a machine that curves them ahead of frying. You may think that the classic Pringle shape, called a hyperbolic paraboloid, is just a marketing gimmick, but it actually makes them efficiently stack while minimizing breakage.
Flat chips are prone to cracking or breaking apart when subjected to the forces of shipping and distribution, but this parabolic shape increases their sturdiness, ease of stackability and ensures that more than 4/5 of your can of Pringles won’t end up as crumbs. It also makes them a little bit easier to get out of the can, if you can reach your hand in to grab them.
The chips are fried in hot oil at 389° F for 11 seconds, getting them to reach the perfect consistency. An air blower will rapidly cool down the Pringles and remove excess hot oil, then they are sent through a machine that seasons the batch based on the flavor of Pringle being produced.
Every Pringle made up until this point has the exact same flavor and foundation, and it’s only now — after they’ve been cooked — that they are flavored before being packaged into their can and shipped to a grocery store shelf near you.
Stay curious, 7B.
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