I mentioned we ate a LOT of sweet potatoes in the fall and I thought I would share some of the recipes we discovered to use them up. Our absolute favorite was sweet potato fries, my kids still love them, even after eating so many.
The hardest part for me was figuring out the best way to cut them, it is a tedious chore to make a big pile for your hungry family with just a knife--doable, but better for a smaller scale side dish than trying to push other more expensive ingredients off your plate.
I started off trying to cut them with a Mandolin slicer--epic fail. I gave it a herculean effort but I just didn't have the muscles to push them through hard enough. My first three potatoes turned out the best and after that my muscles turned to jelly. And I'm not exactly a wimp--not a weight lifter, but I'll take on any other Mom in my play group in a round of arm wrestling :)
Next I tried a commercial french fry cutter. Surprisingly this wasn't much easier, although far more of the potato turned into fry (with the mandolin I was left with a lot of chunks that were too small to try without losing a finger).
So off to Google I went, surely SOMEONE must have figured out how to make the perfect sweet potato fries at home! Not that I could find--lots of how to bake them, how to season them, almost nil on how to cut them. I did see one obscure reference to prebaking them on a message board but with no additional details given as to temperature or time so I set up the Test Kitchen. My regular baked sweet potato recipe calls for baking them at 400 for 40-50 minutes. So I prebaked my first batch at 400 for 15 minutes. These cut like butter--but also made a nice bowl of baby food in the process with all the mushy bits on the edges. Next I tried 400 for 10 minutes and 350 for 10 minutes. 350 for 10 minutes was a winner for me--it still required a bit of muscles to push them through the cutter but without even a tiny bit of mushing--all of the sweet potato turned into gorgeous restaurant-esque fries. Success! (and if you have a friend over to help you lean on the handle you won't even break a sweat, this is a great buddy cooking project)
No french fry cutter? They cost about $40 at your local restaurant supply store--not super expensive, but an extra piece of kitchen equipment to store. Don't bother with the flimsy metal one at the local kitchen supply outlet, it won't give you the results you want, my Mom had one growing up and it struggled to cut regular potatoes, let alone a denser/harder sweet potato. Part two of this post will address cutting them in a cuisinart (I have their thickest slicing blade on the way to try out, it's only $20, far smaller to store, a super versatile). I also plan to test out another reference I came across to putting them in the dehydrator for a short time after cutting/before baking. They said this would make for crispier sweet potato fries by removing some of the moisture prior to baking. Sounds logical so I'll test that out as well. I just recently purchased 2 bushels of sweet potatoes fresh from the field of a local farmer for 50 cents a pound so I have plenty of potatoes to experiment with :) I'm also going to look into some other dehydrator/sweet potato combos--I remember my Mom making Pumpkin Apple fruit leather as a kid and I'd like to try something similar with sweet potato puree.
For today, the take away is **PREBAKE SWEET POTATOES @350 FOR 10 MINUTES BEFORE SLICING INTO FRIES**
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