French Fry Fix

When Sunday night is Saturday night (thank you, President's Day) and you need a fry fix, but you don't want to be THAT bad, you can turn to your good old root tuber friend, the sweet potato. You can bake instead of fry. You can really enjoy yourself!

Earlier in the day, Eric and I had enjoyed a late lunch/early dinner, which Eric so eloquently refers to as, "dunch." Appetizing, I know. It was getting late, we were getting ready to watch a movie, and the munchies were setting in. We both love a good french fry so I decided to give one of the recipes I'd found a few weeks ago, which I had been saving for just such an occasion, a whirl. 

I followed a recipe for guaranteed crispy sweet potato fries.

A disclaimer accompanied the recipe warning that there is "a bit of a learning curve" and that it may take a few tries to achieve optimal crispiness. There was also a recommendation to soak the sliced sweet potatoes from an hour to half a day's time. Because I hadn't planned ahead, we did not have the patience to wait a full hour- we soaked for thirty minutes. 

As I carefully and precisely tried to achieve the perfect corn starch coating for the potatoes (note: you want them to look like they do in the pictures here, try not to get the coating too thick) Eric whipped up the Sriracha mayo dip. The dipping sauce was delicious, but the fries also tasted nice with ketchup and I'm certain they'd taste pretty darn good with the cinnamon butter sauce you sometimes get in restaurants, too. Healthier fries do not necessarily result in healthier dipping sauce...

The fries, as promised, were delicious and crispy (though not uniformly crispy). Turns out, the secret is in the soak. The day after we made the fries, my March issue of Cooking Light arrived in the mail. The Common Cooking Mistakes and How to Avoid Them section featured the Oven Fry Fizzle. According to the experts, the key to achieving crispy, uniformly cooked oven french fries is to presoak. Apparently, soaking the potatoes draws out the starch. Less starch = reduced water content. Reduced water content = less steam produced in the oven. Less steam = crispier fries. See? It's math. 

And another tip, overcrowding fries on the baking sheet creates more of a sauna environment in the oven (lots of steam) and we are looking for tanning bed. Happy snacking!