The Key To Making Carrot Fries That Are Actually Crispy

When it comes to finding the crispiest fried vegetables, there's potatoes and then there's everything else. Spuds won the battle for supremacy a long time ago, and can now be found in every conceivable form. Whether it's french fries, waffle fries, curly fries, potato chips, tater tots, hash browns, and simple oven roasted potato wedges, potatoes are crisped to a golden brown and served on just about every menu in America.

They don't have to be the only option though. Plenty of other good root vegetables can stand up to the heat of a fryer or oven, and bring their own flavor to the party. Beets, eggplants, and parsnips all make great stand-ins for the classic potato french fry.

Another great option out there is another root vegetable, the amazingly versatile carrot. Carrots can give the same crisp snap as an oven baked potato fry, and have a unique sweetness that can be balanced out with salty or spicy notes. The only trouble is that carrots don't have the same natural crispness as potatoes, so it will take an extra ingredient to get them to crisp up properly. 

If you've ever had oven baked carrot sticks then you know that carrots tend to get limp once they've been cooked. It's hard to see how a sagging carrot stick is supposed to hold up to a golden-brown french fry, and so you'll need a secret ingredient to help your carrot get crispy.

Once you drizzle some oil on your carrot sticks, drench them in corn starch to help them get extra crispy. Potatoes are the king of fried vegetables because of their high starch content. The starches form a layer of connections on the potato's exterior, and once the water cooks out of the spud, it leaves behind a series of empty cells that give a crispy sensation whenever you bite into them.

Carrots don't have the same starches so we need to add some to get them to crisp up. Adding a light coating of corn starch accomplishes this, and helps the carrot stand up to the long reign of the crispy potato.

Corn starch is different from corn meal despite their similar names. Corn meal is made from the entire dried kernel, while corn starch is exactly what it sounds like. It's made by extracting the starches from a corn kernel's endosperm, and then drying it into a fine powder. It's used for a wide variety of means, but it's most famous for adding a crispy texture to dishes like tofu stir fry and others.

Corn starch is used for making foods extra crispy because it has the same effect as the starches found in potatoes, but also has a different proportion of starches that makes it even more effective. The two type of starches most commonly found in foods are amylose and amylopectin. When these starches are cooked, they link together to form a molecular structure that gives the impression of crispiness in foods. Potato starch is about 20 to 22 percent amylose, but corn starch is usually closer to 25 or 28 percent amylose. This makes it even more potent for adding that crispy texture, and makes it perfect for adding a crunch to our carrot fries. It's also a great inclusion in any other crispy fried recipes like chicken to help give them an extra boost.