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THE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN JOJO, WHICH IS DEFINITELY NOT A POTATO WEDGE

THE JOJO IS INTERTWINED WITH A TECHNOLOGICAL WONDER OF THE MODERN AGE.

Expand

(Fryer Tuck, Carleigh Oeth)

By Matthew Korfhage
July 12, 2017 at 4:21 pm PDT

Ask a Portlander about jojos, and a lot of them will tell you the same story:
It's just a funny name people in the Northwest call a potato wedge. The name was
invented here and is used only here—a country quirk of our nation's upper-left
corner.

Every Californian tends to hear the word for the first time when they arrive in
Oregon, granting credence to this version of events. Jojos are a staple of
old-school truck stops and bars all over Oregon and Washington, a word most
locals will apply to any old potato cut lengthwise into wedges.

But there's more to it than just frying up a wedge potato in a pan. The roots of
the jojo go deep into the country's industrial midsection. Ask the man whose
family is responsible for more of them locally than anyone.

"A true jojo is a potato wedge that's been breaded, pressure fried and spiced,"
says Paul Nicewonger.

Reel M Inn Jojos (John Kirk)

For 40 years, the company Paul's father started, Nicewonger Co., flooded the
Portland area with pressure fryers used to make chicken and jojos. In the '80s,
every city in Oregon had something called a jojo. Oregon remains obsessed with
the jojo—state-by-state slang maps show Oregon Googles the word
disproportionately often—but it's not unique, and probably not something that
started here.

The jojo is intertwined with a technological wonder of the modern age: the
pressure fryer. Essentially, it's a pressure cooker filled with hot oil that
allows meat to be cooked quickly, at high heat, while still staying juicy.
Pressure frying is the only reason fast-food fried chicken exists at all:
Colonel Sanders had been experimenting with the process as early as the '40s,
when it was a dangerous and improvised method involving the occasional hot-oil
explosion.

Alongside Henny Penny, the Broaster Company of Beloit, Wisc., was the one of the
first to make a reliable pressure fryer, and so "broasting" became synonymous
with the machines. The brand-name has become genericized today.

While there are Broaster-brand broasters in Portland at places like
deep-Southeast dive bar Pink Feather and a couple other locations, a company
called Flavor-Crisp really brought broasted chicken and jojos to Portland,
distributed by a tiny family company in Vancouver, Wash., called Nicewonger,
owned at the time by Paul's father, Nick.

"My father actually invented the jojo," Nicewonger says.

At the time, Nicewonger was distributing pressure fryers through the whole
Portland metro area, selling the first ones to a chain of drive-in theaters in
1958.
According to Nicewonger, his father was at a restaurant trade show demonstrating
the marvels of pressure-frying chicken, and just so happened to be next to some
guys from Idaho who were hawking potatoes.

"A potato will clean up the oil real nice," says Nicewonger. "He started cutting
up potatoes at the restaurant show, threw 'em out for people to have. People
started grabbing 'em and they wanted to know what they were. He called them
jojos. It's what he told me—he just said it's what came into his head."

Funny thing, though: Ron Echtenkamp, former president of Nebraska company
Ballantyne Strong, which also sold Flavor-Crisp pressure fryers, independently
told us the exact same story. Except in Echtenkamp's version, the guy who said
"jojo" was a Flavor-Crisp salesman from the Midwest.

"The guy that actually started the jojo by accident was Ed Nelson—that was back
in 1961," Echtenkamp tells WW. "He was the VIP of the company for a while. Where
it started was they were at the national restaurant show in Chicago. The guy was
from Idaho russet potatoes in the next booth. He said, 'I can show you how to
freshen up that grease… '"

Nobody knows exactly what happened at that Chicago trade show. But Flavor-Crisp
had a hit on their hands. Flavor-Crisp salesman across the country sold the idea
of jojos with their pressure fryers.

"We started selling them in 1962," says Echtenkamp. "We'd tell people, you cut
the potato into quarters, it takes the same time to cook as a two-and-a-quarter
to two-and-a-half pound chicken—you can cook a complete fried meal at the same
time."

Flavor-Crisp reps reportedly sold those jojos in Montana, Minnesota, Nebraska,
Northeast Ohio, upstate New York and the Pacific Northwest—Echtenkamp says the
company even had a trademark on jojos. This patchwork of jojo states allowed any
place where jojos were sold to believe they invented the word
themselves—Nicewonger told us that perhaps only people in the Northwest used the
term.

The company no longer makes the fryers, and locally, Nicewonger mostly sells the
breading—Henny Penny makes a lot of the pressure fryers now sold locally. But
Nicewonger figures he and his father were responsible for a sizeable chunk of
the jojos broasted in this town—including the old Flavor-Crisp pressure fryer
they sold to the Reel M Inn.

We'll get more into the local lore as Jojo Month rolls on. For now, just
remember that it's not unique to the Northwest, and that if it's not breaded and
pressure-fried, it's not a jojo. "There are a lot of places that will call
anything a jojo," Nicewonger says. "A whole lot of people call a potato wedge a
jojo in this marketplace."

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