The Potato Report

When I was younger--around 11 or 12 years old--I had a serious habit with the frozen french fries. I could eat about half a bag by myself. And would, with more frequency than I should have.

Healthy.

In this new life of mine, I don't buy frozen french fries. But did you know you can make them yourself?

OH YES, YOU CAN. And you should, because damn, they're good.

See, I figured this out after my Mother's Day gift to myself of canning seven quarts of potatoes. It was a pain in the ass. It took about three hours start to finish. I wasn't sure it was worth it. I have since used two of the quarts for things like last-minute soup and sending with A. and Cubby when they went camping. The canned potatoes didn't turn out mushy, as I'd feared, though they do taste a little overcooked. But it is nice to have cooked potatoes on hand.

Not nice enough that I was willing to do that again, however, and I still had a lot of seed potatoes left to take care of before they were too sprouted and unusable.

So I looked in the Ball Blue Book. Because that's what you do when you're trying to figure out what to do with excess produce. The newer version of it has a fairly extensive section on freezing, with several options for potatoes. Including french fries.

Right on, Ball Company. Now you're speaking my potato-obsessed language.

Their method involved actually frying the potatoes until they were lightly browned and then freezing them. In a puzzling omission, the book doesn't say how to cook the fries after you take them out of the freezer, but I presume you just fry them again, still frozen, thereby achieving the double cooking most people swear by for proper french fries.

But since I'm much more likely to bake french fries in the oven than fry them in oil, I did what I always do to make oven fries, but didn't finish cooking them. That is, I peeled the potatoes, cut them into pieces, mixed them all up with oil and salt, and spread them out on parchment-lined baking sheets. Then I baked them at 450 degrees until they were soft, but not crisp. After taking them out of the oven, I let them cool on the counter, than put the pans right in the freezer. When the fries were frozen, they were already separate and easy to take off the parchment paper and put in bags.

After that, it was just a matter of putting them back on a parchment-lined baking sheet and baking them again at 450 until they were all browned and crispy. And eating them, while marveling at this miraculous breakthrough I've had. Pre-made frozen french fries! Homemade, pre-made frozen french fries! Yes! It can be done!

And it will be done in my house, from this day forward, amen.