What is the Five Guys "Fry Calibration" Every Morning?

Five Guys is famous for two things: massive burgers and overflowing cups of fresh-cut french fries. But achieving that perfect, crispy-on-the-outside, mashed-potato-on-the-inside fry doesn’t happen by accident.

If you are hired to work the opening shift at Five Guys, your primary job is dealing with the potatoes. And that means mastering the Fry Calibration. Here is what that process actually looks like.

The Potato Prep

Five Guys does not use frozen fries. Every morning, the prep team washes and physically cuts hundreds of pounds of fresh potatoes using manual wall-mounted slicers.

Once cut, the fries are soaked in cold water. This step is absolutely critical because it washes the excess starch off the potatoes. If you don’t wash the starch off, the fries will burn in the oil before they are fully cooked inside.

The Two-Stage Cooking Process

You cannot just drop raw potatoes into boiling oil and expect a perfect Five Guys fry. They use a strict two-stage process:

1. The Pre-Cook: The fries are cooked in peanut oil at a lower temperature for about two and a half minutes until they are limp and slightly opaque. They are then pulled out and left to cool on a rack.
2. The Final Cook: When a customer actually orders fries, the pre-cooked batch is dropped into hotter oil for another two and a half to three minutes to crisp up the outside.

What is Calibration?

Potatoes are a natural crop. Depending on the farm, the season, and the age of the potato, the water and sugar content fluctuates wildly. A potato with high sugar content will cook (and burn) much faster than one with low sugar.

Every morning, the opening manager and the fry cook must calibrate the fryers.

• They perform test batches of pre-cooks and final cooks.
• They perform the “Mush Test”: taking a pre-cooked fry, breaking it in half, and squeezing it to ensure the inside has the consistency of smooth mashed potatoes, leaving no hard, raw chunks in the center.

Based on these tests, they adjust the exact timers on the fryer vats for the rest of the day. If the potatoes are high-sugar that week, the cook time might be dropped by 15 seconds to prevent them from turning a dark brown.