Triple cooked chips: Removing moisture by cooling

boilingchemistrydeep-fryingfrench-friespotatoes

Triple cooked chips (French fries) are made by:

  1. Boiling the chips, then cooling them in the fridge/freezer to remove moisture
  2. Deep frying at a low(ish) temperature, then cooling again as above
  3. Deep frying at a higher temperature

The intermediary cooling steps are for drying and removing water content. How does the fridge/freezer remove water, rather than just changing its temperature/state? Wouldn't, say, sun- or air-drying work better?

Best Answer

The matter here is much more complex than simple "drying out". Starch physics is complicated stuff, and I don't know it in all details, but here is the rough picture.

Starch starts out in tiny granules in the plant. When it is soaked in water and then heated, there is a temperature at which it rapidly turns from a starch suspension (if you had free starch) to a colloid (starch gelatinization). The theory is that these tiny granules burst, but I don't remember if it is proven yet.

At that point, the starch colloid is at its softest. It starts slowly losing water and recrystalizing (starch retrogradation). You can best see it in standard French bread - if you try cutting into it in the first hour after coming out of the oven, you get squished gluey crumb. After that it is soft like cotton for several hours to a day, but gets drier and harder. On the next day, it is already quite dry, and soon after it becomes stone hard.

Just like the gelatinization process, the retrogradation is also temperature dependent. And it happens to work quickest at fridge temperatures. It is slower at warm temperature, and stops when frozen.

So, your goal is not simple dehydration, and other dehydration methods will not really help you much here. You have to stick with what works, and that's temperatures just above freezing.