French fry scientists (who probably also research other things, but come on) have been testing the best conditions for creating delicious fried potato sticks, and it turns out that Jupiter might just have the best fries in the solar system. Now we just need to recreate the cloud city of Bespin there and fulfill our french fry destiny.
Yes, a group of real scientists published a real paper in the journal Food Research International about the optimal conditions for cooking french fries. It has lots of sciencey terms like “crust thickness evolution” and “heat transfer from hot oil to potato surface.” For reference, those are the kinds of factors you should be considering while spinning cooking french fries at varying levels of g-force in a centrifuge for the betterment of human kind.
John Lioumbas and Thodoris Karapantsios of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, found that, in a range of 1.8 to 9 times Earth’s gravity, french fries cooked best at around 3G, which is roughly the same as Jupiter’s “surface” gravity.
There was a downside in that escaping water vapor made the fries’ bottoms soggy, but that likely has a relatively simple solution compared to the feat of setting up a drive-thru on Jupiter.
The research was performed with the goal of learning how different levels of gravity affect food preparation for future astronauts, because if we’re going to eventually shoot human beings way off into the outer reaches of the solar system, it’s of the utmost importance that we have our space-french fry technology perfected for them.
Also, we’re now a little suspicious that NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter is just some kind of secret scientist french fry run.
(via Discovery News, image via tonynetone on flickr)
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Published: Jan 7, 2014 02:53 pm