We love potatoes in our family. Baked potatoes, mashed potatoes, potatoes au gratin, twice baked potatoes - any way you can prepare them really - but ESPECIALLY french fries. Whenever I eat at a new restaurant I have to try their french fries to add to my ongoing list of places that I've eaten fries. On our many road trips I often plan our stops around different mom and pop drive-ins and fast food joints just to try their fries. So it was only natural that I wanted to find a really good french fry recipe that I could make at home.
My way of making fries is loosely based on an Ellie Kreiger Garlic Fries recipe that I first saw on Erin Cooks where Erin rustles up some grub. But honestly, I've made this recipe so many times I've tweaked it here and there and made it my own. Plus, I am always adding different things to them - making them a little different every time (for instance, I don't always have fresh garlic cloves in the house). And since my gas oven runs incredibly hot, I dropped the cooking time down. You'll have to experiment to see what works for you.
Here's how we make our fries:
Chop the potatoes into french fry form. This took some practice to figure out the best way to chop them, but what I do is chop a potato in half, then that half into 4 parts, then turn those 4 parts on their side and chop them into fries.
Here's all my potatoes chopped into fry form. I leave the skins on. I guess I should have reminded you to wash your potatoes in water before chopping. Unless you want dirt grit mixed in. I was chopping 4 potatoes for a serving for both Mason and I.
On this day, these were the things that I was adding to my fries. The things you always want to add are: olive oil and salt. Beyond that - it's a free for all. I did garlic salt (since I didn't have cloves) and thyme leaves. I don't really know what thyme tastes like but I like the little green flecks it adds to the fries. Also - my secret ingredient - a little shot of orange infused olive oil. SO good.
What I do is throw all the fries into a bowl, drip some olive oil on top of them, throw on some salt, galic salt, and thyme leaves, then toss the fries up in the air, catching them (mostly) back in the bowl to get the olive oil all over. If the ones on the bottom look a little dry, add some more olive oil on those.
Then spread them all out on your cookie sheet. I usually use a Silpat baking mat but I had just made cookies this day and it was dirty, so I just spread some olive oil on the sheet before throwing the fries down. You don't want them to stick to the sheet, they're a bugger to get unstuck. Make sure they're in a single layer (or as close to a single layer as you can get).
Cook them! I cook them for 25 minutes at 450 degrees. But like I said, my oven is incredibly hot and so you may need a little longer cook time. I forgot to preheat my oven this time so I probably could have left them in a minute or two longer to get them a little more crunchier, but oh well. You might want to grab a fry out before you take the whole pan out to make sure that it's sufficiently cooked all the way through.
Pile them all up on a plate and serve with your favorite dipping sauce. I do a mixture of mayonaise and gourmet BBQ sauce - but you can also do ranch, fry sauce, garlic mayonaise (another favorite), mustard, or even ketchup (gag).
They'd be perfect for dinner alongside a hamburger, steak, or chicken fingers. Or you can just be like me and eat them for lunch every other day. Even Mason knows now how to toss on the kosher salt for me! Let me know if you plan on making these and how they turn out!
