The Fry-archy: 7 Fabulous French Fry Formats

If there’s an American staple side dish, it’s the good ol’ pomme frite. But all fries are not created equal. I’ve developed an elaborate hierarchy of preferred fry format: the fry-archy, if you will.

First, a definition: by “french fry” I mean a small unit of potato, configured into a hand-held shape, typically fried and served at a restaurant or fast-food joint alongside sandwich-based dishes. This excludes the hash brown, which is delicious, but considered to be more of a breakfast food. I make a special exception for the tater tot–essentially a bite-sized hash brown–because they’re commonly served with dinner.

This also excludes the baked potato, which is awesome in its own right, but is a different beast; the awesomeness of a baked potato is largely determined by the choice of toppings, not by the potato itself. And, of course, it’s not fried. Home fries are likewise excluded, being pan-fried baked potato chunks usually served alongside an omelet. Comparing potato chips to french fries is like comparing monster trucks to sports cars, so I’ll leave them for a future discussion.

Although the fry-archy is a numbered list (quite popular on the Interwebs, I’m told), there is certainly room for movement. Like a starchy version of Dungeons and Dragons, there are two modifiers we can apply to members of the lineup::

• done-ness: A fry must neither be burned, nor (horror of horrors!) undercooked, raw and floppy. Poor preparation can easily drop a fry to the very bottom; a perfect shoestring fry may be preferred to a floppy waffle fry.
• seasoning: Seasoning is an automatic +1 in the rankings. A perfectly prepared, seasoned curly fry can defeat a plain waffle fry, or at least tie.

In the rankings, I assume that the fry is cooked perfectly, and that there is no seasoning applied. Here, then, is the canonical fry-archy:

1. the waffle fry

A more prefect design cannot be imagined; the waffle fry gently cradles salt and ketchup like a basket of flavor, and can be used to scoop condiments like a tuber backhoe. Structurally as sound as a Triscuit, you could substitute these for tortilla chips when making nachos, or cover them in cheese and bacon bits. Asylum in Adams Morgan, D.C. once accidentally ordered waffles instead of their standard fries, and that’s when I became a regular there. Adding seasoning to waffle fries is creating an unimpeachable juggernaut of french-frydom: the Uberfrite.

2. the curly fry

These are shoestring fries done the way God intended. The thin cross-section allows for optimum cooking, yet the springy structure gives them sufficient surface area for dipping. The “inner curl”, about the thickness of your thumb, is perfect for corkscrewing into a cup of ketchup. Even the moon-shaped outer curls carry sauce like little jai-alai baskets. Arby’s does these with seasoning; sadly, they’re frequently undercooked little twists of potato spaghetti. If you can get a well-done batch, they’re heaven.

3. the tater tot

Anything that can get you lusting for cafeteria lunches–or pleasant memories of high school in general–clearly deserves a spot on some kind of list. It’s as if somebody took a hole punch to an inch-thick hash brown. These have the perfect crunchy, crispy crust with a soft yet crumbly interior texture, sort of like a little round chimichanga. They’re thick enough that even the most well-done exterior shields the core, but there’s something about the little granules of potato that keeps the inside from seeming undercooked. These must never be cooked in an oven; they will crumble easily when bitten or submerged in sauces, and you’ll end up with ketchup-potato hash.

4. the steak fry

Like a hollow chip filled with mashed potatoes, the steak fry is the grail for those who crave a smooth, crisp exterior over a perfectly soft and chewy center: steak fries are the chocolate chip cookie of the potato world. Their larger size is the probable cause of the separation of textures, and this also makes them superior for dipping.

5. the “standard”

Sad to say, most people probably think of the shoestring when they think of french fries, but I feel that the true standard is the slightly thicker cut you’ll often see at chain places like Friendly’s or Denny’s, or your local diner. They tend to be slightly crispier than the steak fry, but don’t have as much surface area, so they’re not as good for dipping.

6. the crinkle cut

You’d think that the crinkle cut, with it’s greater surface area for sauce adhesion, would defeat the standard, but this is not the case. The rationale: at a restaurant, it’s conceivable that they might make their own fresh-cut fries, which would have the standard shape. But if the fries next to your club have a crinkle, you might as well go dumpster-dive for the Ore-Ida bag they came from: you’d need a lathe or a mold to make these by hand.

7. the shoestring fry

As I was planning this article, the bartender at one of our local Boston watering holes shook her head sadly as she heard me mention the rock-bottom placement of this old standby, practically guaranteeing the firestorm of controversy that I’m sure is about to ensue. After all, there are a lot of people who regard McDonald’s and their crispy, salty shoestring as the pinnacle of potato perfection. But I have to disagree: first, you need a fistful to pick up a reasonable amount of ketchup. Second, the frying time differential for stringy laces versus little black toothpicks is very small, and a lot of places won’t get it right. Third, and most fry-snobby (if there such a thing), is that there’s just nothing special about them: to borrow from Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, like a McDonald’s McNugget, they are the idea of the french fry, a hollow suggestion of the characteristics that makes it great.

At this point, we might as well have just included the contents of the french fry section of your grocer’s freezer and saved the complicated explanations. But, I will also exclude fries in the shape of dinosaurs or letters of the alphabet or what-have-you, as I’ve never seen those served in an actual restaurant, and because the consistency of the ones I’ve had is much closer to that of a hash brown. These are not bad, but again, they suggest reconstituted potato bits rather than actual potato (whether or not to include Pringles in a discussion of potato chips requires similar consideration).

All other things being equal, I almost always prefer a homemade attempt from something that comes off a Sysco truck, and so a restaurant that tries making its own hand-cut fries usually defeats most of these.

Unless the alternative is a waffle fry.

What’s your preferred french fry? Let the debate begin!