5 tips for truly crispy sweet potato fries
Do your sweet potato fries always come out of the oven limp? Or rock-hard and bitter, with deep-black tips? With these 5 tips, every bite will be: crunch, deliciously crispy. This is how you make truly delicious sweet potato fries. A little sneak peek: with the secret ingredient polenta!
But before we tell you why polenta is the route to perfect crispy sweet potato fries, we’ll first explain what else you need to pay attention to in order to prevent bitter fries with those deep-black tips.
1. Check your oil
Do you automatically reach for the bottle of olive oil? Oh dear, that’s where it already goes wrong. Olive oil starts smoking at high temperatures, and some of the oil’s components even burn. The result: a smelly oven and black fries. You’ll have better results with avocado oil, peanut oil or sunflower oil, as they can handle higher temperatures better.
2. Baking sheet, not dish
We get it: in cookbooks, those fries are always arranged photogenically in a rustic baking dish. But looks say nothing, because those are soggy fries. A baking dish heats up more slowly, so the fries heat up slowly, which means they don’t become crispy. It’s as simple as that. Use a thin metal baking sheet to bake your fries.
3. Hot, hot, hot
When you bake regular potatoes in the oven, the temperature shouldn’t be too high. But sweet potatoes cook much faster than the average potato. So turn up the temperature of your oven to 220 degrees or even higher. Cut your fries evenly, and all the fries will be brown and crispy at the same time. After about 20 minutes, they’ll start to come together; after 25 minutes, your fries will probably be ready. Keep a close eye on them to prevent burnt tips…
4. Toss
The fries need to be coated in oil on all sides before they go into the oven. You can achieve this by tossing the oil and fries together with your hands. Once the fries are in the oven, toss the baking sheet halfway through the baking time.
5. Secret ingredient: polenta
A tablespoon of polenta with your fries gives them an extra-crispy crust. We also read online about cornstarch, but that resulted in fries that hung limp from the fork like spaghetti. How do you do it? Put the cut fries in a large zip lock bag. Add some oil and the polenta. Seal the bag, leaving plenty of air inside, and shake everything together.
This is also the perfect time to add the seasonings: salt, a pinch of cayenne pepper, a little cinnamon, or thyme and rosemary instead. Don’t have a plastic bag nearby? You can of course also mix everything together in a large bowl.
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