How to make french fries like McDonalds
They may not be the healthiest food there is, but there is no doubt that McDonald's chips are very tasty. They are all that potato chips should be: salty, crispy, light and not greasy. And all this, simply by putting the frozen potatoes directly in the fryer.
Surely, we each have our own taste when it comes to cooking french fries, but it is likely that we will not be able to make them as good as McDonald's even if we intend to. What is your secret? Someone has invested time and thinks he has found a way to get french fries as good as those of the McDonalds.
How the perfect fried potato should be
- The exterior must be crispy, but not hard - The surface of the potato must be crispy, and to achieve this it must be covered with micro bubbles. They are the ones that make the potato crispy. The thickness of this layer should be enough for the crunch to be perfect. A little crunchier, and the potato is already hard.
- The interior should be intact, soft, and with a strong potato flavor - Usually, they are usually pasty, like a dough or worse. Some even stop having interior.
- The color of the potato should be light, bright and golden - The darkest potatoes are close to being burned potatoes, with many different flavors than those of the potato itself. The best they are is golden and crispy.
- The potatoes should remain crispy and tasty at the time of eating them - Most of them are freshly fried, but those that are not ready to soften after a few minutes, or remain hard. The potato in the image would not pass the quality control of the perfect potato chip.
All this you could try to achieve with the typical method of frying potatoes twice: the first a bit to create the potato crust, and the second to finish cooking. But, as you know, the desired results are not achieved.
The Mcdonalds formula
But perhaps another alternative is better: steal the recipe directly from McDonalds. Once the frozen MacDonals potatoes are obtained, the process is to study them.
It seems that the potatoes used in the McDonals in those frozen bags are already fried previously, since they contain the mini bubbles we were talking about. When frying potatoes in different oils, the result is the same. They are perfect. Therefore the secret is not oil. The secret is in the processing of the potatoes before freezing them.
This article explains how potatoes are processed. Indeed, McDonalds uses the frying method twice:
They put the potatoes in hot water
The first time the potatoes are fried they are put in very hot oil for 50 seconds
The second time they fry, it is already at McDonalds to serve the customer.
Precooking the potatoes in hot water achieves two things: removing an excess of sugar, which makes the potato lighter and gives it that golden color, and activates a top that helps the potato to remain hard, stiff, not to soften.
Therefore, and if we copy the McDonalds method we should do:
Put the potatoes in water at a constant temperature of 170ºF for 15 minutes
Fry them in oil at 360ºF for 50 seconds
Fry again at 375 ° F for 3 1/2 minutes
If you don't know how to control the water temperature, just boil the potatoes in vinegar water for less than 10 minutes. With this you get the first step.
We already have the crispy and bubbling outside of the potatoes, but how to get the inside? Simple, freezing potatoes, just like McDonalds does. With this we already have the perfect McDonalds potatoes.
