TikTok Couldn't Stop Watching This 15-Hour Potato Hack

The booming social media app TikTok includes a contradictory mix of food hacks that can make cooking seem super simple, as well as complicated recipes that are satisfying to watch, but involve an intimidating amount of steps. The videos range from gourmet foods that take 10 hours to make to dishes that can be thrown together in the air fryer in 10 minutes. The fancy meals, like the ones from TikTok creator @newt are done in a quick-cut format that can be hard to process and seem impossible to recreate, so we'd usually rather leave cooking them to the experts.

Thus, when you see a 15-hour potato hack, the immediate reaction often is "I would probably never make that, but let me watch it anyway to see what it's all about." The curiosity of how someone could take more than half a day to transform the humble potato into a many-layered crispy rectangular masterpiece was enough to make the video from @poppycooks go viral with an eye-popping 18.2 million views. While at first this potato marathon sounds like a daunting endeavor that seemingly no one would ever make, a lot of the 15 hours is actually downtime, so maybe it falls somewhere between the simple and complicated recipes.

Potatoes are a versatile comfort food, so when @poppycooks dedicated her TikTok account to the satisfying spuds, she built a large audience. According to her TikTok bio, Poppy is a "Michelin-trained chef turned potato queen" and authored a best-selling cookbook, so she seemingly has the training and expertise to back up her recipes. Her 15-hour tutorial is her most popular video and although it at first appears to be a complicated process, she makes it look quite simple. 

Poppy turns ordinary spuds into crispy bars by slicing them very thinly, tossing them in beef drippings, layering and baking them, compressing and cooling them in the fridge, cutting the bake into rectangles, and deep frying them. Most of the 15 hours is cooling time, rather than peeling and slicing potatoes, which we and many other viewers can get on board with. 

The seemingly endless crunchy layers of the finished product have us thinking "maybe we do have 15 hours to make potatoes," and TikTok agrees. "This would be on the menu of a Michelin starred restaurant, and cost one paycheck. This looks FANCY AF, and I want it," commented @squeens. "I always save recipes and never make them, but these! I MUST MAKE THEM," commented one user. Another said, "It's like potato baklava." The fact that Poppy got people to even consider spending 15 hours on a single dish is a miracle in itself, so we bow down to this potato queen.