If potato starch has turned up in a recipe or caught your eye at the store, here's what you need to use it with confidence and how to choose it, cook it, store it, what to substitute, and 25 recipes to try it in.

What is potato starch?

Potato starch is the pure starch washed out of crushed potatoes, dried to a fine, slippery white powder. It carries no potato flavor at all, which is the first thing that surprises people. It is a thickener, not a flour, and an unusually strong one.

Two worlds rely on it. In gluten-free and kosher-for-Passover baking it stands in for wheat, giving sponge cakes and cookies their lift and crumb. In Chinese and Japanese cooking it coats meat for velveting and frying, leaving a light, crackly crust.

It sits among the starches on the flour hub rather than the wheat flours.

Thickening and Frying

For sauces and soups, make a slurry first: stir the powder into cold water, then whisk it into the hot liquid near the end. Potato starch has very high thickening power, more than cornstarch, so a little goes a long way and a heavy hand turns a sauce gummy.

Do not boil it hard or long. Potato starch thickens fast at a low temperature, then thins out if held at a rolling boil, so add it at the finish and pull the pan.

As a fry coating it earns its keep. A thin dredge gives fried chicken and pork an extra-crisp, almost glassy shell, the trick behind dishes like Spicy Orange Ginger & Lemon Chicken Breast.

Baking and Pairing

In Passover and gluten-free baking, potato starch is rarely used alone. It partners with eggs or with ground nuts and matzo meal, where it lightens the crumb and keeps things from turning dense, as in Passover Chocolate Nut Torte and Chocolate Chip Sponge Cake.

The common mistake is treating it like flour and using it cup for cup in a normal recipe. It has no gluten and no structure of its own, so a cake built on straight potato starch collapses.

Keep it away from long, hard simmering too, since the thickening it gives breaks down under sustained heat.

Substitutes

Cornstarch is the closest swap for thickening, roughly one-for-one, though it sets a touch cloudier and needs a real boil to cook out its raw taste.

For a crisp fry coating, cornstarch again is the nearest match, with tapioca starch a good second for an even glassier crust.

In baking, do not reach for potato flour by mistake. Potato flour is whole dried potato, heavy and strongly potato-flavored; it behaves nothing like the starch.

Buying and Storing

Look for a bag plainly labeled potato starch, a bright-white, faintly squeaky powder. It is sold near the cornstarch or, around spring, with Passover goods.

Stored dry in a sealed container away from heat and damp, it keeps for years, since pure starch has no oils to spoil. Moisture is its only real enemy, so a tight lid keeps it from caking.

Quick facts

In Chinese

马铃薯淀粉

British (UK) term

Potato starch

en français

fécule

en español

almidón de patata

Recipes using potato starch

There are 25 recipes that contain this ingredient.

All 25 recipes