Improved Air Fryer French Fries

I've been playing with my Avalon Bay AB-Airfryer100 air fryer quite a bit lately, mostly for cooking frozen items like fries, onion rings and chicken nuggets but also for making french fries from scratch.  The homemade fries turn out good, but they lack the craggly crispy surface that comes from deep frying.  As an experiment I decided to try and damage the surface of the fries prior to cooking to see if I could get my "air fried" fries closer to the real thing.

I cut the potatoes into batons as usual, but before the soak I added a cup full of crushed ice to the bowl, covered with a tight fitting lid and shook the tar out of them for about 30 seconds.  I added enough cold water to cover the fries and let them soak for about 30 minutes, then rinsed thoroughly and patted dry with paper towels.  The fries were seasoned simply with 1/2 tsp olive oil, salt, pepper and paprika (one of the things I like about air frying is that you can season before cooking).  Another technique I played with this time is double cooking similar to what you do when deep frying french fries.  The first cooking was done at a lower temperature, 320°f for 10 minutes.  After shaking the basket I returned them to the air fryer and turned the temperature up to  400°f.  I removed the basket every 4-5 minutes to shake and check for doneness.  After a total of about 20 minutes they were golden brown and crispy.







The end result was a fry that seemed to be a bit crispier than the previous attempts, damaging the surface of the fries before cooking does seem to have created more surface area to get crispy.  The two phase cooking method may or may not have contributed anything to the final product, for my next attempt I'll try single stage cooking combined with the ice shake to see if the results are any different.