Hi kids, Felipe here making a rare fill in appearance for the vegan master chef here at DFV. I had an epic haus frau fail in the supply department, we’ve ran out of cashew cream and cashews. This has thwarted the Missus’ plans for her next masterpiece (to be posted in a few days). I knew she would stress out until she had a new post up for you folks, she really loves you, so this was something I needed to take care of. My choices were either run out to the store or write a post myself and well here we are.

Not that long ago I ran across this huge ‘oriental sweet potato’ and I just had to have it though I didn’t have any idea of what I should do with it. After a week or so of taking up space on the counter I decided to make french fries out of it. I don’t know why, it just seemed like the thing to do.

It had been awhile since I had tried making homemade fries because mine have always tended to come out soggy with oil. Somewhere in my badly abused memory banks I remembered reading that the trick to perfect fries is to blanch the potatoes before frying them in oil. Evidently it causes the surface of the fries to solidify(?), so they don’t absorb oil during frying. Searching the interwebs for info on blanching was confusing. It doesn’t seem that there is a universally agreed way to blanch fries, how naive of me to think it would be simple. The one thing most people agreed on was a temperature of approximately 200 degrees. The bigger conflict was oil vs water, and time. The original piece I read was fine with water so I went with that and settled on 2 minutes, because….just because it seemed anything longer would actually cook them.

As I got the water boiling I cut the potato into fries. Once boiling I dropped the fries in the water for 2 minutes, then spread them out to dry on a paper towel. Its important to let the potatoes dry before putting them into the fryer for some scientific reason I am not going to look up now, but you can trust me on that.

Once the deep fryer hit the required 350 degrees I dropped those strips of starchy goodness for 3 minutes. They were a nice golden brown when finished, crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside. I served them hot with Drew’s Poppy Seed Dressing as a dip*. It was my first unqualified french fry win.

*In hindsight I would have dusted them with a little chili powder or something like that.

Before

After