I’ve been wanting to try making sweet potato fries from scratch for a while now. Mostly because I’ve had them several times at restaurants and they were quite tasty. But also because sweet potatoes have less starch than regular potatoes making them more friendly to my diabetic spouse. I wanted an “oven fried” recipe though because I do not own a fryer and oven fried is WAY more healthy than deep fat fried. I found a nice recipe on Simply Recipes which had lots of comments and suggestions on tweaks.
One of the things I liked about the recipe is that it left it up to the cook how to spice the fries and also how to shape them. While the instructions were for a traditional fry style cut, I decided to make mine more chip like. Unfortunately I discovered that my mandolin blade is duller than a piece of paper and wasn’t capable of cutting the sweet potatoes. So I had to resort to old fashion thin slicing with a knife. I then spiced them with cumin, New Mexico chile powder and Chipotle chile powder for some kick. After tossing in oil and spices like the directions recommended I spread them out on baking sheets covered in parchment. IMHO, parchment is worth its weight in gold for this sort of this because it allow one to cook ans crisp things at high heat while ensuring no pan sticking.
The recipe recommends 10 mins per side but I quickly determined thanks to a somewhat watchful eye, that this time was too long for the thickness of my chip shaped fries. 6 minutes per side proved more appropriate. Because of my lack of homogenous thickness, some were a little overcooked but overall they turned out pretty well.
[singlepic id=146 w=640 h=480 float=left]
More importantly they were a hit with the spouse, which isn’t always a given with new ideas and recipes. His only requests.
- less spicy
- bigger portions
So no chipotle chile powder next time and 4 sweet potatoes instead of two. The other note to self is to use a mandolin to get even slices. See follow-up post on mandolin woes.