Oven Baked Garlic Parmesan Potato French Fries Recipe (2024)

FAQs

Why don't my fries get crispy in the oven? ›

Keep the oven shut as much as possible to reach cooking temperature faster. Use a perforated sheet tray. This helps hot air circulate more easily among the fries, increasing crispness. Don't thaw your fries before baking.

This step is commonly missed in making homemade fries, but it might be one of the most important! Soaking your fries in cold water helps remove excess starch, which allows for crispy, golden fries! The cold water bath also helps the french fries retain their shape and contributes to a fluffy inside.

Take a large bowl and soak the potatoes in cold water. 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.

There are many advantages of baked fries over fried fries. Baked fries are lower in calories and fat, and they're also much easier to make at home. When you fry potatoes, a lot of the potato's natural nutrients are lost in the process. But when you bake potatoes, they retain more of their vitamins and minerals.

Reheating Instructions

Fries / Tots / Brussels: Heat oven to 350F. Spray or lightly coat a baking sheet with olive oil. Remove your side from its container and spread evenly across a baking sheet. Bake for 7 minutes and remove.

Blanching. Another restaurant trick is to blanch the fries in water, then freeze them, which allows more of the potato's moisture to escape, thus producing a crispier fry.

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.

Covering in water helps the potato from turning a dark color. Adding salt to the water to form a brine mixture may seem helpful and can impart a flavor to the potato strips, however, salt is a major contributor to the fry oil breaking down prematurely, so I don't recommend it.

Refined peanut oil is the best oil to use for making french fries. You can also use canola or safflower oil. Additionally, restaurant fries are so crispy because, among other things, they use old oil continuously.

Restaurants fry french fries twice

One of the secrets to how fast food restaurants make their french fries crispy is that they double fry them. The result is a french fry that's soft inside and crispy outside.

Why are my french fries soggy in the oven? ›

Don't overfill your baking tray and rack

Frozen fries are full of water so you definitely don't want too much steam in the oven which makes your fries soggy and limpy. Too many trays on the oven racks decrease airflow essential for crispiness, too!

Add herbs and spices for extra flavor.

"Add a bit of gourmet flair to your fries by sprinkling them with some garlic powder, fresh rosemary, seasoned salt, or fresh virgin-olive [oil] or truffle oil," Koeppe said. As well as adding flavor, a drizzle of oil can also help keep fries from sticking together in the oven.

There were several methods that yielded delicious, crispy oven fries, but one stood above all others and has become my new go-to. (I've made them three more times after my initial test). Boiling the cut potatoes first in salted, acidulated water before baking produced the crispiest, most evenly cooked oven fries.

The secret to getting a crispy surface on home fries is to make sure the potatoes aren't warm when you pan-fry them. In this recipe, we precook the potatoes and let them cool to room temperature before they hit the buttered pan, ensuring perfectly crusty and crispy edges.