I actually do have a negative opinion of crinkle cut fries and I actively avoid them. I am certain this is based on years of school lunches which featured (often cold) crinkle cut fries that were as bland as could be. I doubt they were even salted.
I much prefer steak fries, actual British chips, curly fries or waffle fries. The traditional long skinny fry is acceptable but I prefer the above.
I don’t have a huge preference but crinkle fries are ok. The crinkles to help hold the catsup so there’s that. Steak fries are ok usually but sometimes the center feels a bit mealy and not as hot as I’d like. Waffle fries are great. Not a fan of curly fries as they make dipping in catsup more difficult.
Pretty much the only fries I enjoy are fresh McDonald’s fries. I will sometimes have a bite of other kinds (either that came with my meal unasked for or that someone else ordered) and am inevitably disappointed.
With that said, I go to a fresh seafood market that also sells prepared fish & chips from a counter. It doesn’t get any fresher than that. The fish is great, and the freshly prepared crinkle-cut fries are also actually pretty good.
So maybe it’s the fact that almost all fries I get have been sitting around for a while. Anything more than a couple of minutes makes them taste awful, IMHO.
Presumably the theoretical advantage of crinkle-cutting is that it increases the potentially crispy surface area. Making them skinny would have the same effect. But I suspect that it’s vastly more important that they are made to order and recently fried.
My favorites are thin fries, hot from the fryolator. I don’t really like potatoes, so I’m all about the crispy exterior. I understand that people who actively enjoy potatoes often want a thicker, meatier cut, and i respect that. And i don’t hate potatoes, thicker cut fries can be fine.
But crinkle cut and waffle cut are neither fish nor fowl. It doesn’t help that neither style usually comes fresh, in my experience. And they tend to be over seasoned. Fries should have a little salt and nothing else, IMHO.
I’m with the OP. Objectively, crinkle-cut fries can be made just as well as any other shape of French fry, but that’s the shape that was always used in school lunches, and everything about the lunches in the Cleveland public schools was absolutely awful, and so I have a negative association with them.
On the other hand, there’s likewise no inherent reason why waffle-cut or spiral-cut should be better, but in my experience the places that cut them those ways happen to usually do a good job, so I have a positive association with those shapes.
And of course, the best fries are the ones that are a whole potato until you order them, at which point they slice and fry them, and of course one order equals one potato. For those, never anything but salt and vinegar.
They should do it like the live seafood tanks in Chinese restaurants where you point out what you want for dinner and watch them fish it out. They could come around with a wheelbarrow full of soil, and you rummage around to pull out a nice-looking potato.
They work better in the oven than shoestrings. If they’re really fried I’d like shoestrings that are cooked crispier than most places do. Not the fast food fries which are often less than 1/4" thick, good ones should be 5/16", but 3/8" is a little too thick.
I have a friend who claims to make the best fries, and his secret is that he partly cooks them and then freezes them twice before the final fry. That’s about eight times as much work as just slicing potatoes and dropping them into the oil, so i assume he’s getting something out of that process.
He might like different things in fries than you do.
I avoid crinkle cut, whereas I’m okay with almost any other fast food spud.
My assumption is that the crinkles ruin the ratio of soft interior to crunchy exterior/corners. Also the shape seems to loudly announce: We’ve just been scooped from a large bag in the freezer!
I’m not much for fries. I like the ‘coated’ ones, or thin hot freshly made fries. With ketchup or malt vinegar.
Crinkle cut or steak fries, like thick pasta shapes, are just cheap ballast to fill up an empty stomach, fast, for hungry kids and adults who aren’t picky.
Crinkle cut are so low in my fry ranking that I forgot they existed until this thread. I agree that they remind me of school lunches and frozen home meals and are rarely flavorful. I wouldn’t say they’re never salty per se, but they are rarely salted on the outside, where it tastes best, instead occasionally tasting ever so slightly salty throughout the fry, which does not make for a very good sodium-to-flavor ratio.
I don’t remember having a completely perfect crinkle cut. When they were warm and fresh and the ketchup was good I’ll admit they can be slightly better than a decent unadorned vegetable, but that is rare. They are, on average, far worse than the average “regular”-sized straw-shaped fast food fry, which themselves on average also fall behind flat steak fry/chips, curly fries, wedge steak fries, and “small”-sized shoestrings (in order from my favorite to least favorite. I don’t especially like, but don’t hate, the taste of potatoes, which is why wedges are in the middle for me. Flat steak fries and curly fries are both excellent for scooping up ketchup. Wedges only eke past shoestrings because they often have the skin on them and get colder slower than shoestrings. )
Me too! In fact there’s a burger place a few blocks from me which used to have excellent tots. The place had gone horribly downhill since Covid reopening, but maybe they’ve gotten it back together now, I haven’t been since early 2022.
I can see how this would promote crispness, given that the freezer removes moisture. It’s kind of a reorganization of the classic culinary school method, which starts with light dehydration, and then proceeds through two heat passes, first a hot oil poach to cook through and then a hard fry for the crisp exterior. Cooking, freezing, then cooking again is basically the same process restructured.
