Best potatoes for chips

Potatoes for chips

The perfect chip has a crispy outer coating and a light and fluffy inside. The correct potato is essential to get combination. Floury potatoes, generally known as old potatoes, are the best potatoes for chips. If you use new potatoes for chips you will never achieve that light inner filling.
But some varieties of old potatoes make far better chips than others.

The two varieties we recommend for the best chips are Maris Piper and King Edwards. Both are readily available at supermarkets at reasonable prices.

Other excellent varieties for chips include Rooster, Sante (blight resistant) and Pentland Dell. For non-named varieties we would always go for baking potatoes. They are big, cheap and taste excellent when cooked as chips.

If you are really into choosing the best potatoes for chips and know roughly when they were harvested then age is also a consideration. Potatoes picked and then correctly stored (cool with all light excluded) for two to three weeks will give the best results. It doesn't make a huge difference but that's what one of large fast food retailers do with their chips. And that's after millions of dollars of research!

The reason for using specific varieties of potato is that the amount of moisture in a potato varies wildly by variety. Waxy potatoes (mainly new potatoes) hold lots of moisture and retain their shape and texture when cooked. Floury potatoes contain far less moisture and tend to turn to mash much easier when cooked.

The chip needs a floury potato but not so floury that it falls apart. Maris Piper and king Edward fit this profile exactly.

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THE BEST POTATOES FOR CHIPS