Karlos Arguiñano’s trick to make the perfect French fries is cheap and easy

French fries are one of the great classics of our kitchen, but perfecting this art is not so easy. We can mess it up with the temperature of the oil, with the choice of potato, with the cooking time…

Enemies proliferate when it comes to enjoying a dish that, moreover, is unstoppable when it is poorly done. Hard or undercooked potatoes, too greasy or worse still, cold as an icebergthey become regular tonics.

Fortunately, we have rescued this trick from the popular Karlos Arguiñano who in his program told a couple of solutions to make better French fries. It is true that They are not keys that you have to study in cooking schoolbut rather with practice, but both are very useful.

Especially for those days when you have to make a lot of fries and you hate that they stick to you in the pan. A relatively daily drama that also haunts us when we make potatoes of different sizes and the cooking points change.

For this reason, we are going to make use of the wisdom of Karlos Arguiñano to check how to make better French fries is not that difficult and, above all, it ensures a formidable result with hardly any extra effort.

The first thing that Arguiñano recommends, who explains this trick while preparing fried eggs with txistorra, is how to cut the potatoes to fry. We already know that it has to be a new potato, well they release less starch and are less flourybut the type of cut matters a lot.

In this case, what the Beasain chef explains is that we ‘square’ the potatoes. To do this, he prefers to use large-calibre potatoes from which he trims the tips and sides, until leaving a rectangle that he can later cut into sticks much more easily.

It is not a whim or an aesthetic reason, but a practical matter that makes it easier for all the potatoes to be cooked uniformly and thus none of them is undercooked or overcooked. Of course, another of the usual tips when frying potatoes is to be generous with the oil, as this will cook them evenly.

However, the best trick that we have verified in this recipe —beyond the double cooking that it does— is the subsequent task after cutting the potatoes into sticks. What Karlos Arguiñano does is soak the potatoes in sticks for 15 minutes in a bowl with cold water.

With this get them to lose part of the starch, despite being new potatoes, which will allow two things: on the one hand, that they stick much less later in the pan. On the other, they absorb much less oil in frying.

In this way it get lighter and crispier potatoes. All you have to do is drain the potatoes well after soaking, so they don’t splash in the pan, and you can enjoy quality fries with hardly any effort.

Images | iStock KarpenkovDenis / iStock karamba70 / iStock fotolgahan

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