A Chip Off the Old Block
North Fork spud + slicer + fryer = saving the farm.
By Brent Sterling Nemetz

MATTITUCK—Martin Sidor loves potatoes. “Fried potatoes, scalloped potatoes, mashed potatoes, I eat them every day, if not twice a day,” he says as we bounce up and down over 40 some odd acres in Cutchogue where he grows a small portion of his potato crop.

The Sidors are a fourth-generation potato family on the North Fork of Long Island established in 1910 by Martin’s grandfather who emigrated from Poland in the early part of the 20th century. He bought a small farm in Mattituck with about 62 acres and started growing potatoes. “We are on Oregon Road,” says Sidor, in a weathered voice that has spoken across many fields and many seasons. “This is considered the center of the Ag Belt on the North Fork. It has the greatest concentration of contiguous farmland in
production. Over here we have Christmas trees, over there is sweet corn, further down they’re growing sod, pumpkins, cabbage, cauliflower.” In the 1950s there were 39 farm families on Oregon Road. “They were mostly Irish and Polish families,” he says. “At its peak there were about 70,000 acres of potatoes being grown on Long Island. Now we’re down to about 3,000 acres.”

Blame suburban sprawl for part of this (land prices are at an alltime high in North Fork growing country). And many farmers have shifted to more lucrative crops (grapes recently overtook potatoes as the East End’s biggest crop). But, around the world, potato farms are larger than ever before, meaning that only the largest—in this country or elsewhere—can survive the razor-thin profit margins. Potatoes from Canada and beyond continue to flood the market, and Americans are still at the tail end of a low-carb craze. “You can’t get caught up in the emotion of this,” says Sidor, now 58 years old. “Yes, it’s a family business, but it’s still a business and at the end of the year, there has to be a profit to have it continue.”

Enter Martin’s wife, Carol Sidor. In 1973, Martin and Carol began tending the expanded 170-acre farm growing the family’s prized Andover, Marcy and Norwiss varieties of potato, selling wholesale to numerous vendors as far away as Puerto Rico. Despite the spuds’ international reputation for quality, wholesale pricing still leaves the farmer with a small slice of the pie. So, the family began to wonder if potatoes might offer another way. In fact, selling potatoes as chips yields somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 times the profit as compared with selling wholesale potatoes, earning $3.50 per chip pound versus 12 cents per raw potato pound and also creating an increased demand for the Sidors’ potatoes. It wasn’t long before Carol and her two daughters, Cheryl and Maureen, began their small potato-chip operation out of a warehouse in Cutchogue.
These thick-cut, hearty kettle-cooked morsels would soon come to be known as North Fork Potato Chips. “Someone we knew had a small potato chip operation and we bought up most of his equipment and decided to give it a go,” says Carol, who runs the day to day of the chip plant while Martin tends the fields.

In the beginning, the Sidors got all kinds of chip advice. Some suggested they use cottonseed oil to fry the chips, others suggested lard oil. Carol’s early home experiments taste-tested chips of varying thicknesses cooked in different types of oil, but a thicker cut cooked in sunflower oil continued to have a superior taste. “We had a tasting party with the family. We gave the samples to our cousins who shared them with their friends and neighbors and we kept a record of the results. In the end, the sunflower oil was the winner because it lets the flavor of the potato come through the most.”

“My father grows a dynamite potato,” says Cheryl, their eldest daughter, as she readies the de-stoning machine that washes the potatoes and removes stray stones that get mixed in with the spuds during harvest. “And that combined with our thicker cut and unique kettle cooking, you really know you’re eating a potato product.” Generally throughout the potato chip industry, kettlecooked chips are cut about twice the thickness of a regular potato chip and sweet potato chips are even thicker.

The chip-making process from start to finish takes about 25 minutes in the Sidor family’s 2,000-square-foot chip-making facility on Cox Lane in Cutchogue, where a series of Rube Goldbergesque stainless steel conveyor belts move the chips from machine to machine. “On a typical day,” describes Carol, “Martin gets to the chip plant at dawn and starts the fryer so that by the time we arrive at 7 a.m., the oil is at 305 degrees.” The raw 40-pound batch of potatoes is washed, and extraneous debris such as roots and small stones that have been gathered up with the potatoes during harvest are removed. Each potato is machine-peeled and dropped into the slicer, which cuts the potatoes at lightning speed into just the right thickness, and then swept into the kettle fryer, a large steel tub filled with four 50-gallon drums of sunflower oil. Large spinning pinwheels
sweep the chips back and forth for 15 minutes until they are golden and crispy and are then swept up onto another conveyor belt and deposited in a spinner, which, much like a clothes dryer, rapidly centrifuges off the excess liquid and air-dries the chips in preparation for hand-salting. The chips are then dumped, spread out and eye-balled for quality and salted by hand from common household salt shakers. On a typical day, Carol and her crew will fry up about
3,500 bags of both two- and six-ounce chips.

Right now, North Fork Potato Chips only demand a small portion of Martin’s total annual potato crop of about 450,000 pounds. The Marcy and Andover varieties of potatoes used to make the chips are stored in a specially designed warehouse with specific control of temperature, humidity and ventilation to keep the potatoes in prime condition for chipping. Potatoes harvested in late-summer can last well through the following spring.

In a typical year, potato seeds are planted in May and constant vigilance is required during cultivation and irrigation until July. Martin will harvest potatoes midsummer for the chips as Carol’s supply demands at the factory and the bulk of the potato harvest will be done in August. By late summer, the lush and green potato plants are ready for harvest, and Martin and his team kick into high gear aligning a tractor that pulls a potato harvester and a wooden-slatted truck driven alongside to catch the potatoes as they are dug up, foreign material is removed and a conveyor belt hauls them into the bin, ready for either bagging or storage. The spuds not sold to suppliers are immediately taken to a storage shed to be sold throughout late autumn and winter.

At the chip factory, the women are boxing their uniquely shiny silver bags of chips that now come in five varieties—original, barbecue, sweet potato, cheddar & onion, and sour cream & onion and prepping their distribution to customers throughout the 50 states and Canada. “If you’re going to sell chips, you might as well have more varieties, because if a customer likes your regular chips, they’ll also want to try the others, so you end up selling more chips overall,” Carol explains in regard to why she continues to develop new flavors of North Fork Potato Chips. “We had an employee from the Ukraine who had spent a lot of time in England. She remembered how much she loved the cheddar and onion flavored chips that are so popular over there. We made them here and they were a hit.” New chip flavors are always in the works including a new variation of sweet potato chip, with each sweet potato grown locally with tender loving care by Martin.

The word is out: North Fork Potato Chips became the “official snack of the day” on The Rachel Ray Show and their online sales went off the charts; celebrities publicly rave
about them from Whoopi Goldberg, who can’t get enough, buying out the supply from Murray’s Cheese Shop in Manhattan’s West Village, to former Mayor of New York, Ed Koch, who told the New York Daily News that he never forgets to add them to his Fresh Direct delivery. Bon Appétit Magazine even featured North Fork Potato Chips as one of
the top potato chips available on the market. A viral word-of-mouth campaign among wedding planners and brides-to-be have also given the chips star status for gift bags and finger food at area weddings. (Psst. Check out northforkchips.com.)

“Initially we started to carry North Fork Potato Chips because we wanted to support the local farmers out here,” says Diane Schmidt, manager of Handy Pantry in Mattituck.
“But the chips turned out to be a big hit with our customers, so we’ve continued to order more each week. Typically we sell about 50 bags a week. People like to come in here for lunch, buy a sandwich and pick up a bag of the chips to go with it.”

Schmidt’s sentiments were echoed by other East End retailers, like King Kullen, as well as buyers at Whole Foods Market in Manhattan. “It’s everything you want in a chip,” said Rob Kaufelt, the owner of Murray’s Cheese Shop, where North Fork chips are the top seller, surpassing other placers in a small-batch chip landscape currently
dominated by imports for the United Kingdom. “Real food ingredients, just the right amount of saltiness, crunchiness and fattiness.”

The future continues to look bright for North Fork Potato Chips, having been the recipient of two new financial grants from New York State and the USDA which will allow for increased marketing and promotion of the existing and future variety of chips. Even the new Long Island vodka, LiV (rhyming with “five”) has signed on to buy the Sidors’ potato surplus to manufacture their high-end distilled potato product, and, if that weren’t enough, North Fork Potato Chips might be the Official Chip of the Golf U.S. Open held in Farmingdale this June.

Back in the potato fields, Martin is pleased with this season’s latest crop. “Potatoes are a healthy food. The chips are completely natural, and buying them supports agriculture on the North Fork. There’s nothing like a Long Island potato. So this, plus the chips, will hopefully continue the profit so we can continue to farm.”

Martin and Carol’s daughters are vocal about the pride they feel to be a part of the family business and help their father create new opportunities for distributing his signature potatoes. “I’m so honored to be a part of this and help my father who works so hard,” Cheryl adds, as her younger sister, Maureen, preps the peeled whole potatoes
for the next batch of chips. “It’s really nice to work with my family,” says Maureen, “We want to make sure our customers get the perfect potato chip.”

Brent Sterling Nemetz, the Emmy Award–winning filmmaker behind the PBS Series The Souls of New York, continues to highlight everyday people with incredible and inspiring stories. He splits his time between Greenport and New York City.