David R. MacIver's Blog

How to cook frozen chips

This post was originally published at notebook.drmaciver.com.

One of my… I don’t quite want to say guilty pleasures. Lazy foods, comfort foods, something like that, is frozen chips. Or french fries if you prefer. Or waffle fries. Really most sorts of frozen potato product. Because I can’t eat wheat, they end up being probably my second most common choice of carb after rice.

One interesting thing about these products is that they are very much a lazy meal, but they respond extremely well to a little bit of effort. If you take the default path of just pouring them out from the bag into the pan and putting them in the oven, you’ll get something a bit disappointingly soggy. If you spend about 5 minutes of prep time, you can get something genuinely very good.

Here’s how to do it right:

  1. Place them individually in the pan so that they are well separated with an air gap between each chip.
  2. Drizzle a bit of oil over them.
  3. Sprinkle with salt.
  4. Cook them for the amount of time it says on the packet, or even slightly less.

You probably believe that the amount of cooking time on a chip packet is almost always a lie and they need longer, and it is, but if they’re properly separated then they cook more evenly and need less time, and if you’ve added fat you’ve significantly improved the heat transfer rate. If you do the usual thing of adding 10 minutes to the cooking time you’ll get burnt chips.

This actually works even better if you use animal fats. For example, we’ve got a large jar of duck fat that we keep in the fridge. Yesterday I was making Leon’s waffle fries, and after appropriately separating them out I put a tiny dollop of duck fat on each one. The results were, frankly, spectacular. Perfectly crispy and with a much richer flavour than they normally have, for very little extra effort.

I enjoy the contrast of this. There’s something very pleasing to me about the ability to take something unfancy and make it slightly fancier. I also like it because it’s a good example of how doing something properly can make it much better for really not much additional effort.

I also enjoy it because I really like crispy salty potatoes.