The Great French Fry Challenge: Starting off with basic sweet potato fries

My husband has set upon me a challenge to learn how to make french fries of all shapes and sizes ... regular, crinkle cut, waffle fries, and so on. He's especially interested in the waffle fries, but I decided to start with regular old fries. In particular, I decided to try making sweet potato fries.


After reading a few suggestions online, I set forth and made myself some sweet potato fries. I was reasonably successful. I used Paula Deen's salt, pepper and garlic powder seasoning base and her recommended oven temp of 450 degrees.

I decided to peel the sweet potatoes first.

After cutting up the sweet potatoes, I tossed them with olive oil and a mixture of salt, pepper and garlic powder per the Paula Deen recipe, and placed them on the pan. To me, they look like a bunch of carrots.

In addition to the salt, pepper and garlic powder, I tried three different spices. On one third of the pan, I tried paprika, the next third was curry powder, and the final third was Tony Chachere's. The third ended up being the best. I did however over-salt all of them, so I'll take it easy on the next round.

I baked them for about 25 minutes.

Here's proof I made fries from scratch that looked like fries:

I did a quick search online for dipping sauces, so in addition to ketchup I whipped up a sour cream dipping sauce, courtesy Emeril..

Now that I know I can make a fry from scratch, I will move on to trying the other variations that have been requested. I've already done the research on the new kitchen tools I'll need to do the job properly.