SO, WHAT'S THE SKINNY ON THOSE SKINNY FRIES?

Byline: Carol Bidwell Daily News Staff Writer

Think low fat. Dry, right? Cardboardy, tough, with synthetic stuff pumped in to make you think you're eating the real thing.

Then think french fries - meltingly potatoey on the inside, golden brown and crispy on the outside, glistening fresh out of the fryer with ... 45 percent less fat.

Skinny Fries, with no synthetics and no cardboard taste, are the newest offering on the menu at Ruby's, the '40s-style diner in the Promenade mall. You can get a heaping basketful for $2.79, or $1.49 for a half-order with a burger, about 50 cents more than regular fries.

So, do they taste like that yucky low-fat stuff?

``Mmmmm, they are good,'' mumbled Gale Alcorn of Thousand Oaks, nibbling on a hot Skinny Fry.

``Wow!'' exclaimed her dining partner, Jarrett Sarte of Thousand Oaks, biting into a steaming potato stick. ``They're great!''

Just the reaction Greg Hernandez, vice president of operations for the 30-restaurant chain, was hoping for when he agreed to test-market the low-fat fries at a few eateries nearly two years ago.

``We didn't want them to taste like they're good for you,'' Hernandez said. ``What we wanted was a really good-quality product with a lot of flavor.''

The Promenade mall's Ruby's introduced Skinny Fries about six months ago, said general manager Pete Feliciano. Now, 30 percent to 35 percent of chow hounds who order fries specifically request the low-fat version.

In the past two years, the Ruby's chain has sold 1.3 million pounds of the lower-fat fries, Hernandez said.

Originally, the chain was exploring a way to make really low-cal baked french fries, but the convection ovens tested just couldn't hold up under the volume demand, he said. That's when spud giant J.R. Simplot Co. of Boise, Idaho, the inventor of frozen french fries in the 1950s, asked Ruby's to test-market its new low-fat potato product.

So how do the french-fry gremlins suck all the fat out?

Actually, it's a matter of not putting fat in in the first place. The Skinny Fries are made from regular potatoes with a pectin-based coating. Pectin is a substance naturally occurring in apples and orange peels and is most often used to make jellies and jams jell.

``We cook all the fries in vegetable oil ... and with the regular fries, the oil starts to soak in as soon as the fries hit the cooker,'' Feliciano said. ``We cook the Skinny Fries, and the pectin eventually burns off, so the fries are only coming in contact with the oil for the last 30 seconds of cooking. Less oil soaks in.''

It took Simplot, in partnership with Hercules Inc. of Delaware, about 2-1/2 years to come up with the pectin-coating process, said Simplot spokesman David Cuoio.

In 1996, the company began shipping its low-fat fries, frozen in 30-pound bags, to hospitals and other health-care facilities and to a few restaurants throughout the nation. A handful of small Southern California eateries offer the reduced-fat fries, but Ruby's is the only restaurant chain with them on the menu, Cuoio said.

Simplot says a 3.5-ounce serving of the low-fat fries has 7.5 grams of fat and 220 calories, vs. 16 grams of fat and 310 calories in the same serving of regular fries from a top fast-foot eatery.

For many diners, ordering Ruby's Skinny Fries has become a caloric balancing act, kind of like ordering a diet cola with a slab of chocolate cake.

``People figure they're saving fat and calories, so they can have chili and cheese on them,'' Feliciano said.

But not everybody's thrilled about lower-fat french fries.

Frying potatoes with less fat is ``certainly possible, but I'm not excited about it,'' said Dr. David Heber, chief of medicine and clinical nutrition at UCLA. He says french-fry fans hardly ever eat just 3.5 ounces of their favorite - about a half-cup - so they're getting many more calories and grams of fat than the nutritional analysis suggests. They'd do better to spend those calories on a salad or some vegetables and cut the fat out entirely.

CAPTION(S):

Photo

Photo: Ruby's general manager Pete Feliciano prepares a batch of skinny fries - which have 45 percent less fat than regular fries - at the '50-themed Promenade mall eatery.