Baking potatoes is a fairly straightforward thing. One simply peels the potatoes, puts them in an oven and bakes them.
Well, it’s not that simple. As always, there are many tastes, but most people prefer crispy baked potatoes. They should have crunchy skin and soft insides. Naturally, the net is full of more or less sophisticated recipes. After a few random trials and a lot of anecdotal evidence, I decided to do a final test, to end my half-attempts once and for all. The cooking was not an option, since I did not observe any improvement when I cooked the potatoes before baking. Besides, I wanted to make dollar chips which are relatively thin and therefore bake through and through.
The test
I tried three variants of potato preparation before baking. First variant is the common one – potatoes dashed with oil and a bit of salt, the way I usually do it. For the next option I oiled the potatoes by mixing them with my hand, so they were completely covered in film of oil. Finally, I dried the sliced potatoes with a kitchen towel before oiling them with my hands. I salted all the potatoes before baking in the same way, to keep this constant. They were placed in rows on a baking tray covered with baking paper. The potatoes were baked for 40 minutes at 200 °C, without mixing or moving.
The difference could be observed easily. The first variant looked moist with observable liquid on the surface. This was not so prominent with the second variant and the third variant looked almost completely dry. The crispness was related to that, with the first variant being less crispy compared to the second and third one. Between the last two, there was no observable difference in crispiness. Otherwise, all potatoes were comparable in terms of final taste and mouthfeel.
Final conclusion
To sum up, it definitely pays off to oil the potatoes completely. If you want thin chips that do not stick together, then drying them before oiling also seems to be a good idea. Last thing to stress is that all potatoes were laid down individually, with no overlapping. If one would have a lump of overlapping potatoes, then mixing would definitely be required. These conclusions are therefore not valid in such cases and some further experiments would be required. Maybe some time soon.
