Stir-Fried Shredded Potatoes

01

A crunchy potato

Stir-fried shredded potatoes are potatoes cut into fine slivers and cooked just long enough to lose their rawness, but not their crunch.

For most Western cooks, a potato is done when it is soft. In China the most common way of cooking one stops well before that. The potato is cut into thin slices and then into slivers, rinsed, and tossed in a very hot wok for a couple of minutes; it comes out tasting cooked but still crisp. Fuchsia Dunlop calls it the most common way of cooking potatoes in Sichuan, and notes that it seems revolutionary to many Westerners because the potatoes are still a little crunchy when they reach the table. If you have never seen the dish, she adds, you may find it hard to believe it is made from potatoes.

The reason lies in how the potato is seen. In China it is not the starch of the meal: that is the rice, the noodles or the buns. The potato is a vegetable, one dish among several, eaten with rice. The anthropologist Jakob Klein lists stir-fried potato slivers among the country’s most popular potato foods, with di san xian, the Northeast’s sautéed potato, eggplant and green pepper.

The photograph on this page shows the green pepper version, 青椒土豆丝: pale potato slivers threaded with strips of green and red pepper.

Sources [1][5][8]

02

A test of the knife

It is a cheap dish, and a hard one to do well.

Everything depends on the slivers. The finer and more even they are, the better the dish, and Dunlop writes that good Sichuan chefs cut them so fine that in the wok they look like threads of wool. Some of her Sichuan friends joke that the dish should be called 洋芋炒土豆, “foreign tubers fried with earth beans,” using two of the potato’s Chinese names to make a cheap dish sound fancy.

In 2025 the hot dish in Sichuan’s college entrance exam for vocational-school cookery students was exactly this: stir-fried green pepper and potato slivers, one of four practical tasks to finish in 90 minutes. Candidates had to cut potato and pepper into slivers 8 to 10 centimeters long and 2 millimeters wide, soak them and stir-fry them until cooked through but not limp. Examiners scored the evenness of the cut and the precision of the heat; as one student put it, the dish tests the knife and the fire. Each year the hot dish is one common Sichuan classic, such as fish-fragrant pork slivers or mapo tofu.

Sources [1][7]

03

How it stays crisp

Three things keep the crunch: the cut, the rinse and the speed.

Thin, even slivers cook through in moments. Rinsing them in cold water washes off surface starch, so they toss freely instead of sticking together; restaurants usually rinse them, Dunlop notes, though home cooks often skip it and accept a slightly sticky result. Then the wok must be very hot and the cooking short: a few minutes, until the slivers are steaming and no longer taste raw. Cut them thicker, leave the starch on and cook longer, and you get a softer, more familiar potato.

Vinegar is often credited too, and there is some science behind the habit: in a 2017 study, potato slices soaked in acetic acid before cooking came out firmest, with the most intact cell walls. But the experiments soaked the potatoes first, while most cooks splash vinegar in at the end, so in a hot and sour version the vinegar is there mostly for its tang; the crunch still comes from the cut, the rinse and the heat.

Sources [1][2][5]

04

The main versions

The method stays the same; the seasoning changes.

The Sichuan classic is 炝土豆丝: dried chilies and Sichuan pepper sizzled in oil until the chilies darken, then the potatoes thrown in. Dunlop uses the same quick chili-and-pepper method for water spinach, bok choy and lotus root. The green pepper version leaves out the chilies and mixes in about one part pepper to five of potato. Dunlop’s vinegar version, what menus call 醋溜, adds a little soy and dark Chinkiang vinegar; 酸辣土豆丝 keeps the chilies as well as the vinegar. There is also a cold version, blanched for two minutes, then dressed with vinegar and hot chili oil.

Sources [1][5][7]

05

How the potato reached China

Nobody agrees when it arrived.

The potato came from the Americas, and its arrival in China is still argued over. Some Chinese historians place it in the Ming, reading a poem by Xu Wei about a 土豆 as a potato; others write of the 17th century. The American sinologist Berthold Laufer concluded long ago that the date cannot be fixed, and pointed to a 1700 county gazetteer from Fujian that mentions a 马铃薯. The linguist Xiang Mengbing argues that neither Xu Wei’s plant nor the Fujian one was a potato at all, and that the first sure record is 洋芋, “foreign tuber,” in a Hubei gazetteer of 1788, which would put the real arrival in the late 18th century.

Whatever the date, the potato did best in the southwest and northwest, whose main growing areas now account for nearly 70 percent of the country’s potato acreage, and the many names it picked up on the way still map the country. Even the formal word 马铃薯, “horse-bell tuber,” is, Xiang argues, a loan brought back from Japanese.

Sources [3][4][6][8][11]

06

The world’s biggest potato grower

China grows more potatoes than any other country.

China has been the world’s largest potato producer for years. In 2023 the agriculture ministry put the crop at nearly 90 million tons from about 70 million mu, some 4.7 million hectares, both roughly a quarter of the world total. In 2015 the government began promoting the potato as a staple alongside rice, wheat and corn, and a 2016 policy set a goal that by 2020, 30 percent of potatoes would be eaten as staple foods.

Eating habits did not follow the plan. Klein found no evidence of a national surge in potato-eating after 2015. On most tables the potato is still what it was: slivers in a wok, or chunks in a stew.

Sources [8][9][10][11]

07

Ordering it

You will find it on most home-style and Sichuan menus.

Look for 酸辣土豆丝, 青椒土豆丝 or 炝土豆丝 on the menu of a home-style or Sichuan restaurant.

Sources [7][9]

08

Stir-fried potato slivers at home

Ten minutes of cutting, three of cooking.

This is Dunlop’s recipe. Use a firm, waxy potato rather than a floury one, and a sharp knife or a julienne slicer.

Sources [1][5]

09

More everyday Chinese dishes

Other dishes on the atlas.