Why is it that when you try to re heat French fries they never turn out, especially fast food fries. But you can bake frozen fries in which have been pre fried prior to freezing yet they taste fine.
In: Chemistry
The main reason is because the interiors are dehydrated. When they are initially cooked, the starches in the interior trap water and give fries that fluffy texture in the middle. When they cool, that water leaches out of the interior into the exterior. So you get a gritty interior and soggy outside, and no amount of reheating will fix that.
Reheating in the microwave exacerbates the issue. Microwaves primarily work off of heating up water molecules. Since the interior lacks them, the interior stays cold. But microwaves don’t get hot enough to actually boil away the water to make the outside crispy again. So while the outside will get hot due to the presence of water, it stays soggy and gloopy.
Using an oven or air fryer can help, as it actually heats away the water on the outside and can return some of the crisp, but the inside really can’t be fixed.
Frozen fries avoid this issue because the original moisture inside the fry is still there, and can’t escape because it’s been frozen in place.
Frozen fries aren’t fully cooked yet. They’re only pre-boiled or fried a little. Baking or frying them just cooks them the rest of the way (while also thawing them). When you reheat fully cooked fries, you are in danger of overcooking them. In particular, the reheating process may end up dehydrating them.
Also, French fries are meant to be crisp, but anything crisp tends to “decrisp” over time as the crisp outside absorbs moisture (from the air or from the inside of the food), and turns soggy. You can “re-crisp” fries by baking or frying them again, but that also makes it more likely that you’ll overcook them, drying them out and/or burning them. Reheating them in something like a microwave is more gentle, but doesn’t get the outsides hot enough to crisp them up, and also will likely generate steam that only further soggifies them.
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