The McDonald's Menu Item Giada De Laurentiis Can't Resist

Celebrity chefs' professional lives revolve around creating and talking about food that's made skillfully from scratch. But that doesn't mean they don't sometimes crave fast food like the rest of us. While some may try to hide it — Anthony Bourdain used to order his fast food favorite in disguise — more chefs in the public eye are letting people know what they like. Giada De Laurentiis shared her fast food weakness in a Williams Sonoma interview in 2015, revealing, "I can't resist french fries from McDonald's!"

Giada has a lot of company in her love of Mickey D's fries. It's unsurprisingly McDonald's best-selling menu item, and the iconic classic is also the go-to fast food order of Sunny Anderson, her former Food Network colleague. So how does McDonald's make its fries so good? It starts with "premium potatoes," usually Shepody potatoes and three kinds of russet potatoes, which create crispy fries that are fluffy inside.

Once at suppliers' factories, washed and peeled potatoes are launched at high speed through a grid made of sharp knives that cut them into thin, fry-shaped pieces. The raw fries are dipped in dextrose, a sugar that helps them fry consistently golden, and sodium acid pyrophosphate, which prevents them from turning gray when they're frozen, before being blanched and dried. The potatoes are then partially fried, which helps make their exterior crispy, and frozen for shipping. The fries finish cooking in the deep fryer at each McDonald's location for three minutes, and are salted as soon as they come out.

McDonald's used to cook its fries mostly in beef tallow (rendered beef fat), using a blend of 93% tallow and 7% cottonseed oil that gave them their rich flavor. The fast food giant used this mix for decades until rising concerns about saturated fats led it to abandon tallow in 1990. McDonald's switched over to all vegetable oil, but added beef flavoring to try to replicate some of the subtle beefiness from the tallow.

Among those who noticed the difference, and not in a good way, was cooking legend Julia Child, who said a few years after the change that McDonald's fries weren't as good as they used to be because it had dropped the tallow. (There are restaurant chains that do use beef tallow for their french fries.) Today, McDonald's cooks its fries in canola, corn, and soybean oils, and mixes in what's called Natural Beef Flavor during the partial frying at the factory. It doesn't disclose exactly what's in the Natural Beef Flavor, but says on its website that it "contains hydrolyzed wheat and hydrolyzed milk as starting ingredients."

As for how Giada De Laurentiis feels about other McDonald's food, the Italian native had a mixed reaction to two Italian-specific things on the menu at one in Rome. In a TikTok video, she said she thought the tiramisu was overly sweet and that the ladyfingers had been soaked in sugary coffee instead of espresso. But she gave a thumbs up to a cornetto — an Italian croissant — with Nutella.