Crispy, Homemade Oven-Baked French Fries

If you’ve been searching for easy-to-follow instructions showing how to make delicious, crispy french fries at home, you’ve come to the right place. This homemade french fries recipe yields fries with exceptionally crispy edges, thanks to a simple trick: soaking the cut potatoes in hot water for 10 min before baking.

Before I started paying attention to local food and to cooking with seasonal ingredients, I would have categorized potatoes as a winter vegetable, miraculously growing in the frozen solid earth, harvested by farmers through layers of snow.

I never would have guessed that a potato’s peak season in colder climates is actually midsummer through late fall, and that during these months, never do potatoes taste so good. Every summer, when the potatoes start arriving in our CSA, I am blown away by their flavor, by how they need nothing more than olive oil and salt, by how many potatoes we consume as a family each week.

I’ve been on such a potato bender recently I’ve had to supplement our supply at the farmers’ market, and when I was there last, I asked the woman at the Barber’s Farm table why the summer potatoes were so good. She responded: “Because they’re fresh!”

Makes sense.

I mean, if most — all? — vegetables taste their best at their peak season, why shouldn’t potatoes, too? They should, and they do, but I think that because potatoes have the added virtue of storing well, which allows us to enjoy them well past their harvest, we often associate them with winter cooking.

And with many a gratin and mash on the horizon, it’s certainly easy to overlook potatoes this time of year. But thinly sliced or julienned, coated in olive oil, showered with salt, roasted until crisp, summer potatoes couldn’t be more irresistible. Or could they?

After weeks of making completely delicious, no-fuss, oven “chips” and “fries,” I decided to explore the matter further. Could the fries be crispier? Better? After finding little guidance in a few of my favorite vegetable-focused cookbooks, I turned once again to the ever-reliable America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, a book that has been open on my counter for weeks. And, of course, they had a trick. And fortunately, the trick was simple.

How to Make Crispy French Fries at Home

The ATK method calls for soaking the cut potatoes in hot water for 10 minutes before baking them. When developing the recipe, the Test Kitchen sought inspiration from the technique used when making traditional French fries, which is a brief blanching in hot oil or water before the final fry. This blanching step “not only disrupts the starch molecules inside the potato (encouraging a fluffy interior), but also washes away some of the starch on the outside of the potato (preventing a leathery exterior).”

Here’s the method, in sum:

1. Wash potatoes and cut them, lengthwise, into small, even wedges or sticks.
2. Place the potatoes into a large bowl, cover them with hot tap water, and let them soak for 10 minutes.
3. Spread olive oil over a rimmed baking sheet.
4. Drain the potatoes, dry them thoroughly, then toss with olive oil and salt.
5. Arrange the potatoes on a baking sheet and cover tightly with foil.
6. Bake for 5 minutes, remove foil, and continue to bake for 20 to 25 minutes, rotating the pan after 10 minutes, until the fries are golden and crisp.
7. Sere immediately, seasoning with more salt as necessary

When I made the potatoes this way for the first time, everyone around the table agreed that these were especially good, especially crispy on the edges, especially creamy on the inside. I haven’t looked back since.

Warning: Making this recipe might inspire you to go a little crazy at the farmers’ market, to find the 15-pound basket of potatoes selling for $10 to be impossible to resist, to take to the streets flagging down neighbors and passersby to tell them about your newfound oven-fry trick, to hand out potatoes by the half dozen while spouting out the recipe.

Or maybe that’s just me? Fingers crossed it’s the latter.

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