DRMacIver's Notebook

How to cook frozen chips

How to cook frozen chips

Published
2025-05-04

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.Frozen baked and roast potatoes don’t count and are mostly disappointing. They’re not very good, and not that hard to do from fresh. The only real advantage of them is that they keep forever, which is admittedly a pretty big advantage when you want to improvise something out of stores. 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.It occurs to me on writing this that actually it would be better to toss them in oil first. Slightly more washing up to do, but probably worth it.
  3. Sprinkle with salt.Again, if tossing with oil, add the salt at that point.
  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.I think the salt helps too because it draws moisture out faster, but I’m not sure. 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.Because we’re classy motherfuckers. Although honestly for the amount you need to use of it it to get good results it’s actually not that expensive. Price competitive with, say, olive oil. Yesterday I was making Leon’s waffle fries,To accompany a nice easy lazy meal of duck breast. Classy. Motherfuckers. 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.