There are a lot of great dishes in this world that are fairly easy to replicate at home. Killer street tacos? Just get some good masa and work on your tortilla game. Love some cheezy ‘za? Find the perfect recipe for your fave style of pie and learn to shape that dough. Crave pies, cookies, and cakes? There’s definitely someone out there who’ll show you how to get your own personal Great British Bake Off going. All that said, there are some dishes that just require that… [releases a big sigh] industrial touch. Far be it from me to say that restaurant food is superior to doing it at home, but sometimes, you just gotta hand it to restaurants for having easy access to powerful cooking and prep tools, like wood-fired ovens, 20-quart mixers, flat top grills, and deep fryers. Sure, we can buy our specialty outdoor pizza ovens, expensive espresso machines, and carbon steel griddles and pretend it’s the same (in our defense, sometimes we do a pretty excellent job), but it’s still not always easy to get that big kitchen flair.
Case in point: french fries. I’ve been making potatoes for many years. I’ve made Kenji López-Alt’s amazing roasted potatoes from The Food Lab. I’ve made latkes many, many times; I’ve baked, fried, and grilled spuds every which way. Despite all the fabulous potato preparations out there—and they’re literally all good, every single one of them—I’m sure you’ll find it shocking (or not, if you behold my gut) when I join the rest of America and disclose that I just fucking love french fries. For many years, I’d just sort of whip up bootleg versions, usually consisting of haphazardly cut potatoes roasted with some olive oil, salt, and pepper. I’m no John Wick (though my knife skills are pretty decent IMHO), but I do think it’s a stretch for the typical home cook to cut perfectly even fries like you’d see in a restaurant. Beyond the aesthetics of uniformity we all love to see on the plate, there’s also a practical reason to cut fries the same: It makes them cook evenly. Despite the fantasy that there’s an ex-Army cook (read: Frank Costanza) sitting in the back of every restaurant peeling and cutting potatoes all day, there’s a more practical and accessible way to get there. Enter: the fry cutter.
In my home, we do burger night about once a week. It’s a great, glorious, most excellent day, and I always look forward to it. While my household has collectively upgraded our burger skills over the course of many dinners, I realized one day recently that my fries were still lacking. They were good and fine, to be sure, but, you know, what if Guy Fieri walked in? I could never live with the shame. So I decided to level up. I read a bunch of french fry recipes and spent a lot of time thinking about the fries I liked most. I don’t know when the lightning hit me, but one day I just came to the conclusion that I needed to be a little extra and buy a french fry cutter for my house. It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
The french fry cutter I picked was by Sopito and had almost 8,000 reviews on Amazon for an average of 4.5 stars; there are also a number of other cutters that I’d love to try and that I’m sure are just as good, especially one by New Star Foodservice, who makes one of my all-time favorite spatulas. I figured I should get the three-eighths-of-an-inch size, since half-inch fries felt like something I could probably do by hand. There wasn’t much to the french fry cutter when it arrived—all I had to do was bolt in the lever and it was pretty much ready to get choppin’.
Since I usually bake my fries, I tried out a few different fry recipes, all using Russets, which IMO are the best for fries (though I’m also very down with some Yukon Gold fries from time to time). The first time I cut a potato with the cutter, it was a very powerful moment, making me regret the many years I’d spent eating potatoes at home that weren’t prepared like this. (Like, it was so easy.) One second, I was looking at a potato; the next, it was fries. It’s truly an experience that everybody should (and can!) have. The first outing, I basically just tossed them in some olive oil, salt, and pepper, and baked them spread out on two baking sheets lined with parchment paper for about an hour at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Honestly, they were just so fucking good.
Going forward, I tried a couple other bake temps and spice combos, but I think simple is best for french fries. I also wanted to do an actual fry, though, so I booted up directions from the GOAT (aka Kenji López-Alt’s reverse-engineered McDonald’s-style fry recipe). This had me cutting the fries and boiling them in water with white vinegar and salt; then, I fried them in 400 degree oil for 50 seconds, let them cool to room temperature, and fried them again until brown. They were just unreal. They tasted so fresh and so clean (or fatty in a desirable and toothsome way, as fries should be). Not to get on a soapbox, but what makes frying at home so good is that you’re (ostensibly) using clean oil—not dirty fryer oil that’s been used to cook a dozen different dishes over and over again across hours of kitchen madness. No, this was fresh oil used specifically for this one dish, and you can absolutely tell the difference when you cook like that; the fries are airy and crisp, with a fresh, briny flavor that makes you question why you’d ever get fries in public again (answer: because you’re drunk).
Listen, if you’ve read this far, you probably love french fries. If you want to seriously up your game at home—I mean, like, into a whole new ballpark—just invest in a fry cutter. It couldn’t be easier to use, and it’ll make your fries, whether baked or fried, taste absolutely pro. Now, when it comes to replicating a Wendy’s Frosty, I can’t help you.
Buy the Sopito french fry cutter on Amazon.
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