Place them in a large bowl and cover with cold water. Allow them to soak, 2 to 3 hours. (You can also stick them in the fridge and let them soak overnight.) When you're ready to make the fries, drain off the water and lay the potatoes on 2 baking sheets lined with paper towels.
The soaking, Mr. Nasr said, is the secret to the crisp texture of the fries. It draws out the starch, making them more rigid and less likely to stick together. The cooks fry them twice, first blanching them until slightly limp in peanut oil heated to 325 degrees, and again in 375-degree oil to crisp and brown them.
I soak sliced potatoes intended for fries in ice cubed, cold, slightly salted (kosher salt is the best) water, as it leeches out the excess starch and allows a better fry without as much starch.
Soaking potatoes in water helps remove excess starch. Excess starch can inhibit the potatoes from cooking evenly as well as creating a gummy or sticky texture on the outside of your potatoes. Cold water is used because hot water would react with the starch activating it, making it harder to separate from the potatoes.
Allow the water to rest for about 30 minutes so the starch settles. Pour the water out of the bowl, leaving the starch at the bottom of the bowl. Combine the starch and potatoes just before cooking.
Why use salt water for soaking potatoes? There's moisture naturally found in potatoes, and moisture is drawn to higher concentrations of salt. (This is a process called osmosis.) So, if you put the potatoes in a salt water bath, that will help draw out some of their moisture, resulting in crispier fries.
The best potatoes for French fries are soaked in a sugar solution before frying. The sugar solution has something to do with the carbohydrates and prevents the potatoes from soaking up a lot of grease, so they get crunchy.
You should soak potatoes in salt water before cooking, especially if you are making French fries or baked potatoes, or when you are preparing potatoes ahead of time. Soaking potatoes helps to draw out water and remove excess starch, giving you firmer potatoes when cooked.
The additional step of allowing the peeled, washed and cut potatoes to soak in cold water removes excess potato starch from the outside. This will help with the crisping up of the potatoes when they bake or roast. Soaking the potatoes in cold water also prevents the potatoes from browning too fast when cooking.
Let the potatoes sit in the water for at least 15 minutes, for best results overnight. The water will remove all the excess starch from the potatoes and will solve any graying issues and will give you crispier potatoes as well!
(If you decide to try soaking the raw potatoes anyway, they can be soaked in water in the refrigerator for several hours without any safety concerns. Potatoes can be soaked even overnight as long as they are in the refrigerator.)
Add enough cold water to cover the tops of the potatoes. Add ½ to 1 teaspoon salt to the water. Turn the burner on high and bring water to boiling. Reduce the heat to medium-low or low.
Boiling the potatoes in a salt and vinegar bath allows them to soak up all of that briny flavor before you dry them off and crisp them up in the oven. The result is a soft-in-the-center, crispy-on-the-outside potato that's loaded with flavor.
Let the oil get really hot before adding potatoes. It won't smoke but it will ripple in the pan. Don't overcrowd the skillet. You can put a cover on the skillet to help them cook for the first bit but take it off for the last part of cooking or your potatoes will be soggy.
Once in our kitchens, we cook them in our canola-blend oil so you can have them crispy and hot—just the way you like them. Want to hear more about our fry ingredients? Get the down low on how we flavor our fries.
Yes, McDonald's fries are made from real potatoes. The fast-food giant uses what they call "premium potatoes" to make their fries. The potatoes consist of different varieties, like Russet Burbank, Russet Ranger, Umatilla Russet, and Shepody.
Just be sure to store peeled potatoes in water for no more than 24 hours. After that, the cool refrigerator air will convert the starches in the potatoes to sugar, causing the flavor and texture of the spuds to change. Instead, just start cooking potatoes for a mash, potato salad, or hash browns.
Make sure that you soak the potatoes for at least 2-3 hours. Soaking the sliced potatoes in cold water is one of the main steps to prepare perfect French Fries. The cold water removes the starch present outside the potatoes so that you get perfectly crispy fries.
Don't soak cut potatoes longer than overnight.
If keeping potatoes in water for more than an hour, refrigerate. However, don't soak them any longer than overnight—after that, the potatoes start to lose their structure and flavor.
We usually recommend no more than 24 hours. You can keep the potatoes from absorbing the water by making sure the water is not salted, and is chilled (you can even add ice to the water). To keep the potatoes from turning black from oxidation, add 1 teaspoon of lemon juice or white wine vinegar to a gallon of water.
Step 1. Combine potatoes, 1 cup vinegar, and 1 Tbsp. kosher salt in a medium saucepan; add water to cover by 1”. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer until potatoes are tender, 20–25 minutes; drain and pat dry.
All that monotonous starch with nothing to make it tasty is a royal waste. And the highest-impact way to avoid under-seasoned, taste-like-nothing potatoes is to salt the potato cooking water. (Sadly, if you skip this step, almost no amount of salt added directly to the cooked potatoes can redeem them.)
The most important part here is that you use cold water instead of boiled – if you boil the water first, the outside will cook faster than the inside resulting in an uneven texture. Cubed spuds will take around 15 minutes where larger chunks or whole new potatoes will be 20-25 minutes.
Soaking the cut potatoes for at least five minutes or rinsing them under cold water removes the starch from the surface, but there is no evidence that soaking removes a significant amount of carbohydrate.
It's best to parboil the potatoes first before pan frying to get cooked tender inside. In my experience, not boiling the potatoes first will result in not well cooked inside but crispy outer potatoes. Unless you are cutting the potatoes extra thin (which makes it like potatoes crips) then it's best to boil first.