British Chips

People rarely make homemade chips in Britain. I don’t blame them. Just as French fries are widely available in the United States, you can get chips—British thick-cut fried potatoes—just about anywhere in the U.K. Shatteringly crisp with a soft, fluffy interior, British chips are something of a marvel when done right, and are especially delicious when you season them liberally with a dash of salt and malt vinegar. The spuds are a staple at pubs, chip shops, and restaurants, and like fries, they’re available frozen at the grocery store.

Though they’re easily found in the United Kingdom, they’re not as common in the U.S., where people generally prefer thinner fries. I’m going to diplomatically say that one isn’t better than the other; they’re just different iterations of fried potatoes, a category of food I think we can all get behind. (If you don’t like crispy potatoes, who even are you???)

I spent four years living in the U.K. when I was in university and ate plenty of chips ranging from sub-par to great while there, but I’ve had perfect chips just once in my life: last March, at chef Tom Kitchin’s The Scran and Scallie, a cozy gastropub in Edinburgh. We had a spectacular meal of cullen skink (a Scottish smoked fish chowder) and steak pie, complete with sticky toffee pudding and vanilla ice cream. Everything was delicious, but it was the side of chips that I couldn’t stop thinking about. They were the platonic ideal of what a chip should be: piping hot and generously seasoned, with an extraordinarily crisp exterior that gave way to a pillowy cloud within.

After the chips arrived at the table, my husband and I spent the rest of dinner discussing how the kitchen fried up such wonderfully fluffy potatoes. I suspected they cooked the potatoes more than once and froze them in between. When I called the restaurant a year later to find out—the chips clearly left a mark on me if I still couldn't shake the thought of them after a year—they told me they get their fries frozen! But my suspicion was more or less correct: These particular frozen fries are quite fancy, triple-blanched and double-fried, frozen, then fried to order. 

By the time I called the restaurant to find out, I was already well on my way to my own recipe that replicated their results. Mine isn't exactly the same as theirs, but it shares all the key techniques.

To develop my recipe, I looked at two popular fried potato techniques: one from British chef Heston Blumenthal, and the other from Kenji. Blumenthal’s triple-cooked chips are legendary, so much so that Britain’s Sunday Times called it his “most influential culinary innovation.” Blumenthal’s method goes something like this: Simmer the potatoes in water for 20 to 30 minutes until they’re practically falling apart, transfer the potatoes onto a cooling rack, then freeze them for at least an hour. He then has you blanch the potatoes in hot oil (266ºF/130ºC), freeze them again, then fry them for a final time at 350ºF (180ºC). Blumenthal’s recipe does produce very good, very fluffy chips. But by the time I’d simmered my potatoes for 20 minutes, most of them had begun to disintegrate. 

Like Blumenthal, Kenji also triple cooks his potatoes in his recipe for thin and crispy French fries, but utilizes vinegar to help the spuds keep their shape as they simmer. Kenji’s potatoes also cook in water for a lot less time than Blumenthal’s: 10 minutes as opposed to Blumenthal’s recommended 20 to 30 minutes. Kenji’s approach includes an optional step to freeze the potatoes between the first and second fry, and I tested batches of fries with and without this step. Though the fries that weren’t frozen were still good, they weren’t quite as fluffy as the ones that I froze overnight—and definitely not as fluffy as Blumenthal’s chips, which were frozen not once, but twice.

The resulting recipe below is a mish-mash of the two approaches. Like Kenji, I simmer the potatoes in a solution of water and vinegar. For chips with an incredibly soft interior, I, like Blumenthal, recommend freezing them between each stage of cooking. I’ve made it an optional step, as it isn’t necessary and may feel excessive to anyone looking for a simple chip recipe. Taking the time to freeze your taters, however, will absolutely produce the fluffiest chips. And if you’re going the extra mile to make chips from scratch, why not go hard and make the very best ones? 

How to Make the Crispiest British Chips

Cook Your Potatoes in Water and Vinegar

As Kenji explained in his French fry recipe, cooking the potatoes in water before frying them rinses off excess sugars and prevents the potatoes from becoming too dark as they fry. Now, you could go ahead and just boil your potatoes in water…or you could add vinegar to help strengthen the pectin in the potatoes. It’s a clever trick that Kenji uses; as he notes, pectin acts as a kind of glue by holding a potato’s cells together. Within those cells, there are starch granules that swell—and eventually burst—when they come in contact with heat and water. Using a solution of water, salt, and vinegar helps to bolster the pectin and the potatoes’ cell walls, which helps the potatoes keep their shape during both boiling and frying. It also helps them become (and stay!) extra crunchy, which is what we want in a chip.

Freeze Your Potatoes

Like I said, you can skip this step if you’re short on time—but there’s a very good reason for freezing your potatoes. According to Kenji, freezing potatoes “causes their moisture to convert to ice, forming sharp, jagged crystals. These crystals damage the cell structure of the potato, making it easier for them to be released once they are heated and convert to steam.” If you don’t want to freeze the potatoes twice—once after they’re boiled and again after they’ve been blanched in oil—consider freezing them just once after the initial boil. Kenji’s recipe doesn’t double-freeze, but it’s definitely worth doing if you have the time to do it: In my testing, I found that even the potatoes that were frozen for just three hours were significantly fluffier than those that spent no time in the freezer at all. 

Though Kenji recommends an overnight freeze for his potatoes, I didn’t taste a significant difference in texture between potatoes that had just been frozen for three hours and potatoes that were frozen overnight. As long as your potatoes are frozen solid, they’ll fry up into magnificently brittle chips with fluffy interiors.

Double-Fry Your Potatoes

As with any French fry recipe (sorry, I know, we’re talking about British chips) worth its salt (and vinegar), we’re going to double-fry these spuds. Remember how we talked about the cell walls being held together by pectin earlier? According to Harold McGee in On Food and Cooking, gently frying the potatoes at a lower temperature gives the starch in the potatoes’ surface cells “time to dissolve from the granules and reinforce and glue together the outer cell walls into a thicker, more robust layer.” It’s only after this outer coating has been established that we can fry the spuds for a second time at higher heat to expel any remaining moisture, creating an ultra-crisp potato. (Kenji’s also written extensively about why we should double-fry French fries.)

This is why French fries are often first blanched in oil before they are fried a second time. McGee recommends initially cooking the potatoes in relatively cool oil within the temperature range of 250 to 325ºF (121 to 163ºC); I oil-blanch mine at 265ºF. It’s essential for the potatoes to cool completely between the first and second fry; if you aren’t freezing the potatoes, you’ll want to transfer them to a wire rack, where excess oil can drip off and any remaining moisture can easily evaporate before you proceed with the second round of frying.

Season Generously

Last, but most certainly not least, you’ll want to season your spuds generously with salt and a touch of malt vinegar. Because the only thing worse than having no chips is having poorly seasoned chips. And nobody wants that. Salt and malt vinegar are traditional seasonings for chips in the U.K., and though the vinegar is optional, it adds an acidic kick that cuts through the greasiness of the potatoes. These chips take time and multiple stages of cooking, but they’re so worth it for that perfect bite. Just ask our editors who gobbled them up in the test kitchen. They devoured them faster than you could say chip butty!