You Know You Love Your French Fried Onions

This is a delicate operation. Crumbs lurk around every corner. The ideal FFO is a nice round O, or at least a crunchy strip. That's what they're after, here in the lab, where they perfect the recipe that is mass-produced and lands, in 2.8- and 6-ounce containers, in supermarkets from coast to coast (with biggest sales in the Midwest, of course). You can buy Imported Crispy Onions (all natural, from Denmark) from Whole Foods Market. You can update the recipe with a batch of homemade leek chips. But if you want authenticity, you will go for French's, which has cornered the FFO market since absorbing Durkee in 1985.

There's really only one shot for the plant to get its production right. French's mustard and its GourMayo sells all year long, but its onions? Sixty percent of the company's FFO sales come between October and December, say French's officials, or 30 million units of canned onion aroma.

To ask why we eat FFOs is an attempt to get at the root of Thanksgiving gluttony itself. There is no reason except that we are Americans and it is our God-given right.

So these are the ingredients that make the FFOs that produce the casseroles that were invented in 1955 that feed Americans on Thanksgiving Day:

Flour, water, salt and an annual allotment of 8 million pounds of palm oil and 17 million pounds of yellow onions from Upstate New York. The onions are hand-selected for the perfect level of beige-y-ness; digital color samples guide onion selectors away from those that are too green. They are sliced thin, coated in batter and placed on a 125-foot-long conveyor-belt fryer that's filled with palm oil heated to 400 degrees. When they come out of the fryer, they are dried for three hours, salted and then chemically analyzed to make sure they haven't been salted too much.

It's all about the process and consistency. It's all about opening a can of onions that tastes like every other can of onions you've ever opened. It's all about not fiddling with the product. It's all about showcasing the legacy attributes.

The thing to remember about French Fried Onions and the holidays is this, "When you put FFOs in the mix, it's a different experience. I mean you can make a lot of variations on this casserole. Cream of celery soup instead of mushroom, broccoli instead of green beans. But you cannot take away the onions."

Washington Post