That's Using The Old Onion
For the Holidays, Tradition Comes Out on Top

By Monica Hesse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 20, 2007

MONTVALE, N.J. Here, in a gleaming stainless-steel test laboratory, six employees in hairnets and white coats are peering at our Thanksgiving destiny. It is a tray of French's French Fried Onions, or FFOs, those succulent morsels of oil and shame that must top the green bean casserole that must appear on 30 million groaning tables on Thursday.

They must taste like reliability itself, a polestar of Americana in an era of artisanal persimmon-infused oil glazing haricots verts.

They must taste like they have since 1955, when Campbell's invented the homey two-can side dish, your beans and your cream of mushroom soup, a soft, soothing mush of a thing given a kick and a crunch with your can of FFOs.

The color in this particular batch of FFOs on this particular day before Thanksgiving is uniform golden, which is nice but not necessary:

"We do think consumers appreciate a range," says Barbara Yaros, the director of marketing for French's. "Not like a Pringle -- I mean, who doesn't like a Pringle? -- but they all look the same. Some people like a darker onion. Some people like a burned one."

She pokes one gloved finger toward the onions on the tray, pointing out the unique hues and shapes of each FFO. Like snowflakes, they are.

Everybody leans in for a closer view.

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.

The texture on this test batch is good -- thin and crispy, no soggy onions in this kitchen. The taste? Fuggedaboudit! Now this is one delicious fried onion. Sometimes, if the national crop is weak, you're going to end up with a product that's not as sweet as millions of Americans have come to expect. But these? They're good. Sprinkle on top of a green bean casserole and bake it at 350 for a couple-five minutes, and you got a holiday meal.

* * *

Janet Andreas is a former home-economics teacher who now runs the French's Test Kitchen.

She has a cap of black hair and a French manicure and when you ask how old she is, she says, "Oh, Gawd, do you need to print that?" She has been at French's for 20 years and is in charge of developing new company recipes, specifically ones that showcase the FFOs. Because she also gets to work with the mustard and the barbecue sauce and the potato sticks, she has enough variety in her work life, she says, to prevent fried-onion burnout.

Today in the test kitchen, she's laid out on a green tablecloth an Original Green Bean Casserole, a updated Deluxe Mushroom Green Bean Bake (fresh mushrooms along with the "cream of," a little splash of white wine) and a Southwestern take on the dish that involves cheddar FFOs instead of regular. She's serving a sort of French's Fried Onion sampler platter to a reporter and a handful of company staffers.

Everyone sits around and snacks on French Fried Onions, while they wait for Andreas to finish making lunch.

Last week Yaros went to a cooking seminar. "The guy was wonderful," she says. "But I only took home a few of the recipes because they all had like, 10, 12 ingredients. Like roux. Hey Janet, what's roux?"

"What?"

"Roux."

"Roux?"

" Roux. It's like a thickening agent?"

"Oh, ROUX. Yeah, it's flour and fat."

"See? Janet would never put roux in one of her recipes," Yaros says.

Andreas cooks for the American people, for people who don't have time for 10, 12 ingredients. In fact, Campbell's recommends a five-ingredient green bean casserole: beans, mushroom soup, milk, FFOs and soy sauce. French's has eliminated the soy. Who needs an extra step?

She does a few green bean casseroles for demonstrations every year, plus the one she makes for Thanksgiving at home with her boyfriend. It's good to make sure the recipe still works, and it's so easy. She can do it right now in the time it takes you to have a little chat, it's so easy.

What's not easy is convincing the general public that FFOs are not only to be eaten around holidays. "Over the last five years, I've put FFOs in meatloaf, in hamburgers, on hamburgers, in soup, on soup, in salad. . . . It has to be easy, it has to be tasty, it has to mimic a behavior everyone is familiar with.

"Nothing really stuck until the chicken last year."

The chicken.

The chicken, everyone is very proud of. A picture of the chicken even graces the cover of the cheddar FFO can.

What the chicken is, is a chicken breast, dipped in egg and rolled in crushed FFOs.

"It's like bread crumbs," says Stacey Bender, who does PR for French's. "It's better than bread crumbs but it's like bread crumbs."

"Last Thanksgiving I made them as an appetizer," Yaros says. "Like a chicken finger appetizer." Kids love it. Kids ask for it. That's what an FFO will do, she says. Make a kid eat his protein and vegetables.

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.

"The drying process is very important," says Nick Palamidis, a research associate.

What temperature are the onions dried at?

He looks nervous. He pushes his anti-splatter goggles up on his nose. "It's proprietary," he says. He looks for help from the marketing reps. Is there a more polite way to say that? he wants to know.

The rest of the French's crew jumps in.

No, it's proprietary, whaddaya gonna do?

Like Coke, does Coke give away their recipe?

This is not an easy product to make!

Trade secrets, trade secrets.

"We have gone from a metal pull-top to a foil top," Yaros says. "We're not going to rest on our laurels."

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.

So savory.

So crunchy.

They're like a little texture surprise.

The thing to remember about French Fried Onions and the holidays is this, Yaros says: "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."