SAUTÉED POTATOES

CRISP SLICES OR CHUNKS OF SAUTÉED POTATOES (often called home fries) are a breakfast favorite. They also make an excellent side dish for dinner. Some recipes suggest that potatoes can be sautéed without precooking. Most sources, however, start by boiling or baking potatoes and then sautéing to get them crisp. We started with questions about the potatoes (the type, whether or not they should be peeled, whether to slice or dice) and then moved on to test various cooking methods.

Yukon Golds were the clear favorites in our testing. They produced home fries with a rich golden color and crisp exterior. Starchier russet potatoes fell apart in our tests and are not recommended. Red potatoes are fine but could not match the Yukon Golds in terms of appearance or flavor.

All of our testers preferred the texture and flavor that the skin added, so we decided not to peel potatoes for home fries. We found that sliced potatoes were much harder to cook than diced potatoes. A pound of sliced potatoes stacks up three or four layers deep in a large skillet, and the result is uneven cooking, with some potatoes burned and others undercooked. Potatoes cut into ¹/₂-inch dice brown much more evenly. We found that a 12-inch skillet can hold 1¹/₄ pounds of diced potatoes in a single layer.

In our tests, raw potatoes, no matter how small they were cut, burned before the interior had cooked sufficiently. We decided to precook the potatoes before sautéing.

We started by dicing baked potatoes and found the texture gummy and the exterior not terribly crisp. Potatoes that were boiled until tender and then diced broke down in the pan, and the inside was overcooked by the time the exterior was crisp. We tried braising diced potatoes, figuring we could cook them through in a covered pan with some water and fat, remove the cover, let the water evaporate, and then crisp up the potatoes in the remaining fat. Although this sounds like a good idea, each time the potatoes stuck horribly to the pan.

The best results occurred when we boiled diced potatoes briefly, drained them, and then sautéed them. Since the potatoes were drained once the water came to a boil, they didn't absorb much water and held their shape nicely.

We think potatoes taste best when sautéed in butter, but a combination of oil and butter is much easier to work with and far less likely to burn. We particularly liked the combination of corn oil and butter, but peanut oil, canola oil, or olive oil can be used in place of corn oil.