Did you know that the process of steaming plays a vital role in the deep-frying of foods?

In an article for BBC Future, Greenwood explores how chips were best cooked, from choosing the best potato to combining actions of freezing, boiling and deep frying the chips for an optimum result.

“People say you’ve got to find a potato that has a high level of starch in it and the Russet variety is the one that’s most used over here in the States," she tells Sean.

“That’s in part because its long so it’s easy to cut into long thin strips but also because it’s got a very high starch level and it also has very dense flesh which is important from keeping the frying oil from penetrating to deeply into the potato.”

Here’s a clip from the show in which Veronique explains the concept of deep-frying and double cooking your chips;

The science of the perfect chip doesn’t stop there though. In her article, Greenwood refers to a technique used by Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck.

“He famously concocted a recipe for cooking chips three times. The first time is a light boiling, followed by a stint in a vacuum chamber to remove the traces of water. The second is deep-frying at a relatively low temperature, and the third is the high-heat, crust-forming extravaganza. The chips you get at the end are so desiccated they have a glassy texture, with a fluffy interior – making them arguably the finest chips on the planet.”

They might be the finest chips on this planet, but chemists John Lioumbas and Thodoris Karapantsios of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece discovered that Jupiter had the ideal gravitational pull for cooking chips.

On the show, Sean asks Veronique about the process of cooking chips at 3 times the earths’ gravity. Here’s what she has to say;