J. Kenji Lopez-Alt at Serious Eats loves McDonald's french fries. After an exhaustive investigation -- more than 43 batches in 3 days -- he emerges triumphant with The Burger Lab: How to Make Perfect Thin and Crisp French Fries.

The most obvious way to do this is just to copy McDonald's exactly: cook the potatoes in a precisely maintained 170°F water bath for 15 minutes. I tried it using my Sous-Vide Supreme, followed by a fry at 360°F for 50 seconds, and a second fry at 375°F for 3 1/2 minutes. It worked like a charm. The fries tasted nearly identical to those that come from McDonald's. Of course, now two new questions entered my head: What about for those poor souls who don't have a temperature-controlled water bath? And more importantly, now that I've got the fries down, could I make them even better? I mean, they taste fantastic now, but we all know that McDonald's fries get soggy pretty darn fast. If these fries were really going to be perfect, I'd have to address that issue.

The link above is to the science. Here's just the recipe.

This is way too much work.

But he likes this sort of science project. In the paragraph I quoted above, he had a bad link on the "Sous-Vide Supreme" so I don't know if he meant the authentic, $449.95 version or his own beer-cooler hack, $21.96 with plastic bags.