The Mistake You're Making When Cooking French Fries In The Oven

Baking french fries in the oven can create deliciously crispy, crunchy fries for a tasty snack or side dish that complements a variety of meals. When you're oven-baking a big batch of french fries for your family, friends, or party guests, you'll want to make enough for everyone to enjoy. It may seem quicker and more convenient to bake a whole lot of fries in one go so everyone can dig in sooner. However, if you try to cook a large batch of fries in a single bake, your friends might be displeased with the snack. Oven-baking too many at once could result in unevenly baked french fries.

Making any of several crucial mistakes can cause french fries to not cook evenly in the oven, resulting in an inconsistent texture and doneness throughout your batch of fries. Two of these easily avoidable mistakes pertain to the size of the individual french fries, and the amount of french fries that you try to bake all at once. To ensure all of your french fries are perfectly cooked and crisped, make sure they're similar in size and structure when you arrange them on a sheet pan, so your oven can evenly bake your french fries.

It can be tempting to toss a bunch of randomly cut potatoes or frozen french fries onto a baking tray, and simply pop them in the oven to bake. If you take this approach, you may be overlooking how baking different sizes of fries at the same time will adversely affect the result. If you oven-bake french fries of various sizes, some will cook faster than others, meaning smaller fries will be cooked through and become crispier more quickly than bigger ones. If you want your french fries to cook and crisp evenly, you might need to bake multiple batches.

Overcrowding the baking pan with fries will make them steam in your oven instead of bake, resulting in squishy, soggy fries lacking that essential crispiness. Overcrowding leading to steaming is especially a risk when you're oven-baking frozen french fries, because they contain a lot of water that will turn into steam in the heat of an oven. Ironically, you should steam your fries first for the crispiest oven fries. Whether or not you steam first, arranging a reasonable amount of similarly sized fries on your baking tray with sufficient space between them is the best way to prevent soggy oven-baked fries. 

While there are plenty of tips for making crispier homemade french fries, there are also several more mistakes you may risk making that can lead to limp oven-baked fries. For instance, baking your french fries on an ordinary baking sheet is usually just fine. However, you may be missing out on just how crispy your fries can get if you bake them on a perforated baking tray. Those perforations allow the oven heat to flow through and around the fries more effectively, resulting in crispier fries. 

Conversely, a deep baking tray can trap steam and prevent your french fries from developing a deliciously crispy texture. A shallow baking tray will allow that steam to escape much easier, allowing the heat from your oven to crisp up your fries nicely.

If you're oven-baking frozen french fries, you might think that thawing the fries before cooking them is the best course of action. However, if you thaw the fries first and then bake them, your fries will come out soggier. Oven-bake your frozen french fries fresh out of the freezer to get the crispiest results.