Tots. Slices. Gills. What do they have in common?

The answer to that question is coming up. First, an announcement:

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Picture this: you’re making a sandwich.

You’ve got your breads, your spreads, your veggies, cheeses, etcetera, and you reach for the meat. (Or plant-based protein if that’s your thing.) You pull several cold cuts out of the container and they’re kinda glommed together. You separate the layers and pile them on your sandwich, all the while wishing, I wish these were thinner. You remember tv commercials of yore featuring closeup shots of backlit, paper-thin meat slices dropping onto dewy lettuce leaves.

Why?

Why do we have this desire for thinner cuts of meat for our sandwiches? Do they somehow taste better?

Actually, they might. And it might be for the same reason that gills help fish breathe.

Surface Area

When I first learned about fish gills in 6th grade biology, I had trouble understanding why gills are shaped the way they are. My teacher told me to picture a flat piece of paper. Fish breathe by extracting oxygen from the water around them. In order to do that, their gills have to be touching the water molecules. The more of that gill that touches the water, the more oxygen the fish can extract. If a fish’s gill was flat like a piece of paper, that gill would be taking up 8.5 x 11 inches of space.

Imagine folding that piece of paper into a tight accordion shape. Now you have the same amount of surface taking up less space. A fish’s gills don’t take up a lot of space, but they have lots of surface area.

More surface area = more contact with oxygen.

Black and white diagram showing the structure of fish gills. The text reads from the upper left: Journal of Experimental Biology. G M Highes, The Dimensions of Fish Gills in Relation to Their Function, J Exp Biol, 1966, Fig. 1. The title is repeated below the diagram.

If you want a super-detailed explanation of how this works, check out this research paper from 1966. (No, I did not read the whole thing.) From the abstract (emphasis mine):

“It is concluded that more active fish not only have larger gill areas but that the conditions for gaseous exchange are better than for more sluggish forms and that the area is increased in such a way as to keep the resistance to flow to a low value. This is mainly achieved by having an increased total filament length and a large number of secondary folds. More sluggish fish have more widely spaced and higher lamellae and their total filament length is reduced. The resistance to flow relative to the area is less in these forms than in the more active species.”

Back to cold cuts.

Do thin slices taste better? Probably yes. This article from NPR goes into detail about how the way you handle produce affects the flavor. They’re talking about veggies, but plenty of folks agree that the same principle applies to meat.* Increased surface area means increased flavor. The taste has nowhere to hide.

* Example 1

* Example 2

* Example 3

Tater tots are another great example of this principle. Or so I thought.

I thought Tater Tots (as I use that term in the general sense to refer to cylindrical shredded seasoned potato things) were the last word in crunch.

But wait. There’s a competing potato product that objectively, empirically, definitively brings greater crunch satisfaction to the table.

Introducing The Crown.

Animated image of actress Claire Foy portraying Queen Elizabeth II in the Netflix series The Crown.

No, not that one.

Photo of crispy crowns, which are fried potato nuggets, in a bowl with a smaller bowl of sauce. The golden potato pucks are garnished with chopped parsley. This image was sourced from the cooking blog https://plantedinthekitchen.com/.

This one. Apparently Crispy Crowns are crunchier than Tater Tots.

Liz Cook of The Haterade breaks it down. I assumed that because a cylindrical tot has more surface area than a puck-shaped crown, it should have more crunch. But Liz and her partner also took mass and moisture content into account. Additionally, the crowns have flat surfaces as well as jagged ones. This is an opportunity to get a good sear if your cooking method allows for that.

But part of Liz’s point is that Crispy Crowns are the perfect depression food because they require very little attention during cooking, and the payoff is oh so satisfying.

“Crispy Crowns have given me one way to practice hope, however feeble. There’s a tendency to think about “comfort food” as anesthetizing—as though comforting ourselves were an act of disengagement from the world and its problems. But to me, it has also been a path out of numbness and back to sensation. A path back to caring.”

Read Liz Cook's whole article on Depression Tots here.

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