Always crispy potatoes
A perfectly crispy potato takes your weekly AVG—potatoes, vegetables and meat—to the next level. And this is how you get it onto your plate. Eat with a good dollop of mayonnaise.
We’ve already written about how to make the perfect fries at home. Skipping the deep fryer? Here’s how to achieve ultimate crisp in the oven or pan.
The potato
It all starts with which potato you choose. Doré or Bilstar have the best structure for baking. Deliciously fluffy inside, and they contain plenty of starch, which equals a good crunch. If you want a creamier interior, Yukon Gold is your potato of choice.
The fat
If you’re really going for ultimate crisp, you need to ditch the oil and go for animal fat. Duck fat, goose fat and beef dripping are your besties. You’ll also get reasonably crispy potatoes with olive oil, but once you taste the animal version, you’ll never go back.
Parboiling
Before you bake your potatoes in your carefully chosen fat, you still need to prep them. Parboiling ensures you don’t end up with a raw interior. It also makes the starch swell, so to speak. That means extra crisp.
First boil the water and season it generously with salt before adding the potatoes. Boiling the water first makes the outside just slightly overcooked and brittle, which is exactly what we want. When you then bake them, you get lots of little crispy bits on the outside.
Drying
After boiling, it’s extremely important to dry the potatoes again. Moisture means they’ll steam instead of baking until crisp. Spread the potatoes out in a single layer on a tea towel and wait until they’re completely dry. Feel free to set aside an hour for this—you can do something else in the meantime.
Hot hot hot
The time has come: we can start baking. It’s important that the temperature of the oven or pan is very high. The potatoes are already cooked inside; all that’s left is to make the outer layer as crispy as possible. The best way to do this is in a scorching-hot oven or pan.
A cast-iron skillet retains the most heat, so if you want to use a pan, choose that. Make sure the oven is at least 200 degrees, but 230 is even better. To cook them evenly, it’s important to toss the potatoes halfway through. If you cut them into bite-sized pieces, they’ll need about 50 minutes.
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