Shake Shake Fries: The Problem Was Never the Flavour, It Was Particle Size

The wasabi Shake Shake Fries are one of the most ordered and most filmed things we make. Almost none of the work that went into them is visible, and the part that took longest had nothing to do with taste.

What Was Already Out There

I like seasoned fries. Not sauced, seasoned. And I had wanted a properly Japanese version of that for a long time.

Shichimi fries exist. Plenty of places do them, and every time I had them the same thing happened: the seasoning ended up at the bottom of the basket instead of on the potato. Shichimi is a coarse blend, chilli flake and sesame and citrus peel and seaweed in visible pieces, and those pieces have no reason to stay on a fry.

Later, on a consulting job, I thought I had a better idea: furikake fries. I was pleased with myself for about a day, which is how long it took to find out furikake fries already existed too.

And they had exactly the same problem. Furikake is flakes. Flakes bounce off.

Why It Falls Off

This is the whole engineering problem, and it is not complicated once you say it out loud.

A hot fry is coated in a thin film of oil. Anything fine enough sticks to that film on contact and stays there. Anything coarse only touches it at a couple of points, has too much weight for the contact it is making, and slides off on the way to the table.

So the answer was not a better blend. It was the same ingredients, smaller.

I worked out a process to grind furikake down to a fine powder. That is it. That is the invention. Once the particles are small enough, the seasoning behaves completely differently: it coats rather than sits, and it stays on through being carried, shaken and eaten.

The Bag Was Somebody Else's Idea

I was originally designing this for a client, and what they wanted was something that would go viral.

That is where the bag came from. Print the instructions on it, hand the guest an unfinished dish, and let them do the last step. It is interactive, so people film it, and a thing people film travels.

There is a second reason it is a good design, and it is the reason I still use it. The kitchen makes one product. Fries. Everything that distinguishes one order from another happens in the bag, at the table, by the person eating it. No extra station, no separate prep, no new skill on the line. One fry, many dishes.

And the shaking genuinely works better than we would. Seasoning tossed in a kitchen lands on whichever side is facing up. Somebody shaking their own dinner in a sealed bag gets every surface.

Five Seasonings Down to Two

We launched with five, all of them ground-down versions of existing furikake blends.

That did not survive contact with reality. Pre-made blends are formulated to be sprinkled on rice, not to be the entire flavour of a hot fried thing, and over time the problems with using them that way stacked up.

So I cut it back. Of the original five, shiso was the one worth keeping, and it is still on the menu: tart, herbal, more interesting than it sounds.

Then I built the wasabi one myself rather than grinding somebody else's blend. That is now one of the most popular things we serve and easily the most posted.

Wasabi heat is the right heat for this. It goes up through your nose and then it is gone, instead of building on your tongue the way chilli does. You can eat a whole order of them. With chilli you would slow down halfway.

How to Order Them

Ask for wasabi if you want the one people come in for, shiso if you want the one I would eat second.

Then actually shake it. Properly, with the bag closed, more than you think is necessary. The dish only finishes if you do that part, and you are the one holding it.

They are on the menu, alongside the other two ways we do fries.