My daughter avoids "Frozen Idaho (White) Baked Potato Fries" and prefers to give Baked Sweet Potato Fries to her children.

A while back I had Crisp Baked Sweet Potatoes "Fries" from store bought frozen bags that were quite good, but have not been able to make Crisp Baked Sweet Potatoes "Fries" from fresh sweet potatoes.

Any suggestions?

As you may know, potato products are flash fried/blanched in hot oil about 375F for just minutes. Strained of excess oil, then blast chilled and finally bagged for shipment. When you open your bag of sweet potato fries, they still retain a small amount of oil. Follow the manufacuture instructions, place on a baking sheet and turn 1/2 way through the cooking time. This reduces the total fat by about 1/2 and normally gives you crisp fries. If the fries are not crisp enough, increase the cooking time and or temp. If no instructions are available, my method is to spray raw sweet potatos with olive oil (ever so lightly) tray them, on a baking sheet with parchment paper, and cook at 425 F for 30 minutes. I turn and season them 1/2 through cooking. If working from sratch, try to cut and match the size of your fries with those you buy. I hope this is helpful. Best regards, from North Caolina.

Thank you Terry! I will give this a try... I hadn't thought about the parchment paper. Best regards from Washington state!

It seems there is no way to make "Crisp" Baked Sweet Potato Fries without first partially cooking them in hot oil.

If I can sell this method (partially deep frying the sweet potato fries) to my daughter, it may be a real win. "Partially" cooking sweet potato fries in a deep fryer (or skillet) in fairly large quantities and then freeze them for later use would make including them in meals much easier.

A bit more specific info, a video perhaps, would make my day, especially if this method would produce the "crispy baked sweet potato fries" that I had at a party I attended recently.

Here are a couple of threads that we found that might be of interest to you both (Jim and Sue):

http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/378235
http://www.fortysomething.ca/2007/12/crispy_baked_sweet_potato_frie.php

One thing to note is that sweet potatoes have a higher water content than most potatoes so this makes it particularly tricky. So, as we will show in our upcoming lesson on roasting vegetables, a very hot oven, not over-crowding and pre-coating are all key steps to getting that nicely roasted outer coating. However, I don't think you will ever get the same results you'd get if you deep- or shallow-fried them.

Here is a link to making french fries if you'd like to take the sweet potatoes through to the blanching stage:

http://rouxbe.com/recipes/271-pommes-frites-french-fries/preview

And although I agree with you Jim that a video on this subject would be perfect, we just can't produce a video to answer all questions. Every request gets cued up in our production work-flow and we film on a schedule and according to a curriculum. Roasting vegetables is coming up, as is shallow and deep-frying. Cheers. Joe.

I just came across this blog post for making crispy sweet potatoes fries that I thought I would share, for anyone that is still interested. Cheers!

Thanks for that link Dawn, whoever is writing that blog seems "slightly" obsessed with fries. I love enthusiasm like that :) Will definitely be making fries this weekend.

No worries, Christian, please let us know how they work out for you. And as for the "fry obsession", I also like when people are slightly obsessed/enthusiastic about things as well. It's often how we get good at something. Cheers!

I failed my fries this weekend. They were limp and grey. Tasted OK though... I think maybe I didn't blanch them long enough. Will have to try again soon, as the experience left me feeling somewhat defeated :)

Semi-related: Where/how do you dispose of 1 litre of used frying oil? I know I can clean and keep it, but eventually I'll want to throw it out (especially after cooking e.g. fish sticks). I'm pretty sure the sink and toilet isn't really well suited for this?

Depending on where you live, there may be certain regulations for properly disposing of oils. You could always call a local restaurant or fast food place to see where they dispose of their deep fry oil. You may even be able to drop it off for them to add to there collection.

With that said, many people just put the old COLD cooking oil in a closed container of some sort - an old coffee container, glass jar or bottle, and then dispose of it that way. Hope that helps. Cheers!