Why Are Tortilla Chips So Damn Good?
For the past thirty years a handful of scientists at Texas A&M have devoted themselves to answering an extremely important question.
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The techniques behind the Tostito are closely guarded for a reason. On the second day of the short course, one of Rooney’s colleagues, Cassandra McDonough, gave a presentation drawn from her work using an environmental scanning electron microscope to probe the microstructure of tortillas, chips, masa, and other materials. Often this work is done on contract, to solve a specific problem: A company comes to her with some bad masa and some good and asks her to figure out what went wrong with the inferior sample. She showed us side-by-side magnified images of the two masas, and the difference was stark. The good masa appeared gluey and lumpy, like overcooked oatmeal, while the bad masa looked like a pile of pebbles. The corn in the second case had been too hard, McDonough concluded, and so it hadn’t been nixtamalized sufficiently. Yet in other cases, the client’s motives are more openly competitive: A company will present a rival’s product and ask for an analysis of it. “You want to know why someone’s doing better than you,” she said.
Later I went back to speak with McDonough in private, and she confirmed that snack manufacturing can indeed be a ruthless business. Sometimes people have enrolled in the course under the apparent misconception that because of Texas A&M’s relationship with snack food manufacturers, they would learn industry secrets. “It’s crazy—they get really cutthroat. People will just brazenly come out and say, ‘How does Frito-Lay do this?’ And I’ll say, ‘You work for who?’ And they’ll sheepishly walk away.” I thought back to a pair of Korean snack men who’d been at the course; one night I’d bumped into them at Albertsons, where they’d been loading up a cart with what seemed like one of every bagged product in the chip aisle. My first thought was that they were planning some sort of hedonistic munch-a-thon in their hotel room, but then I realized they meant to take all these chips home to Korea. I told McDonough about them, and she predicted, “They’re going to take them back and pick them apart and have somebody tell them how this was made.”
A soft-voiced woman with close-cropped hair who favors work boots and cargo pants, McDonough describes herself as a visual puzzle-solver. “It’s intuitive for me because I’m dyslexic, and I’ve always dealt with images rather than words,” she told me. She’ll look at an image of, say, a tortilla chip magnified two hundred times, which with its air pockets and porous solid parts looks like a giant sponge, and see more than just a static picture. As a result of her training and visual orientation, “I see everything that’s going into it and coming out of it. I see the chip and I can see how the masa was milled, how it was treated, how it was fried, how it was treated after frying. It all flows together for me. I view it as an organism,” she said.
Some of McDonough’s puzzles come directly from a company with a specific problem or case of chip envy; others arise out of broader food trends. The low-fat phenomenon of the eighties, for example, spurred A&M’s scientists to look at exactly what happens during frying. “That was a fundamental question that nobody knew the answer to,” McDonough said. “How much oil is really in here, and how does it get in, and how can we keep it from getting in?” Using images of chips at different stages of frying, McDonough was able to chart this process visually, while a professor in the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, Rosana Moreira, developed a mathematical model that showed that much of the oil actually penetrated the chip after frying.
McDonough was also able to see what made chips crunch, namely, their air-cell walls collapsing. “Something as simple as an air-cell wall—that’s what makes it crunchy and not dense,” she said. The company that sells a good chip, she said, is essentially selling air; the crispier and crunchier the chip, the more the eater will eat.
It’s been almost thirty years since Rooney first took her on as a technician. “Our interview kind of went, ‘Do you mind getting yelled at?’ ” she recalled. “And I said, ‘No, you’re pretty much like my dad.’ And he said, ‘Okay, you’re hired.’ So I worked my way up, and he encouraged me to get my master’s degree in food science while I was working. I ran his labs. I learned a little bit of everything.” Today she works in a narrow office brimming with papers and corn samples and military paraphernalia; her husband is in the Army, as is her brother. Beside her desk is a photo of her husband with his head wrapped in a desert nomad’s scarf, aiming a gun at the camera. At the time of our conversation, all she was at liberty to say was that he was in Afghanistan. Between chip secrets and troop location secrets, she said, “I’ve got so many little boxes up there that are sealed shut.”
Having studied chips extensively, McDonough knows by sight whether she’ll like a chip or not. “If it’s translucent, real oily, I know I’m not going to like it. I like light, crunchy chips. I like white corn because it’s sweeter. I don’t like added flavors.” I asked her whether a particular chip came to mind. “For me, I would go with Tostitos. I think they are probably the best chip on the market.”
Again I had cause to doubt myself as a chip eater (and later I would yet another time, after Rooney said that he too favors Tostitos, though it’s Original Flavor SunChips he’s helpless to quit eating once he starts). I confessed my preference for a thinner, less salty, more flavorful chip to McDonough. “Yeah, in North Texas they like the lighter chips. In Austin they like the kind of chip you’re talking about. In Houston they get more into the thicker chips. When you get into San Antonio and South Texas, they want thick, oily chips.” I asked her how she knew these things. Naturally, she couldn’t say.
Then again, tastes can’t always be accounted for. Recently, McDonough’s best friend had defected from Tostitos to H-E-B’s Hatch chile-flavored chips, she told me. Now, here was a puzzle: It was as if the friend had up and moved to Montreal for no good reason. “She was a Tostitos fanatic forever, then suddenly she started buying these Hatch chile chips,” said McDonough, who nonetheless was not at all tempted to try a Hatch chile-flavored tortilla chip. “It doesn’t look like a good chip to me.”
Chris Kuechenmeister, the director of Frito-Lay’s public relations department, did eventually call, as promised, but he quickly made it clear that I wouldn’t find out anything about how the company had developed the perfect chip. “The challenge I face is, we have a lot of things we do over here that are very confidential,” he said. He was able to confirm that Doritos were introduced in 1966, Tostitos in 1980. It was a short conversation.
The most I could do was what the Koreans had done. As I was about to leave College Station and drive back to Austin, I stopped at a gas station and dropped $3.99 on a bag of Tostitos Restaurant Style chips. I opened the bag in the car and tried one. Newly attuned to its texture, I did find something marvelous in it, in that lightness and crispiness unexampled in nature or in any home kitchen, for that matter. Here is a completely processed, endlessly proliferated thing, but each one is just slightly different, while the methods of its proliferation are kept under lock and key in Plano.
I wouldn’t say I liked Tostitos any more than I had before, but that afternoon I was better able to appreciate them. And after eating four or five or maybe ten I stopped at another gas station and deposited them in the garbage, so as not to reach Austin with two pounds of chips in my stomach and my lips salt-shriveled away to nothing. I would think back to this a few days later when I spoke to Jorge Garcia, who runs Curra’s Grill, a popular Mexican restaurant in Austin. I’d contacted him to learn more about how someone in his position, someone whose restaurant chomps through 150 pounds of chips per day, decides on the best chip to serve. He gamely answered my questions but then added his own assessment: “Give me two beers and I’ll take any of them.”
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