The SweetPo Solution

I love the taste of sweet potatoes. They combine everything you like about sweet with everything you like about potatoes! Well, most restaurants serve frozen sweet potato fries that have extra starch and/or sugar pumped into or coating them. Some of these are tasty, but you do lose some of the natural earthy flavor. That's why we wanted to go with cutting real garnet yams for our SweetPo fries. And, it definitely doesn't hurt that the frozen fries are more expensive.

Well, we came to realize why most folks go with frozen. Frying a real yam is a pain in the ass. To get the sweets properly crispy, we had to fry them until they turned dark brown. The taste was good but some people really took offense to the looks. If you took the sweets out while they were still orange, they weren't crispy enough.

Then, the breakthrough...vinegar! Last time we were at the Brig, a friendly fellow who happened to be the executive chef at a fancy hotel, suggested that if we wanted to make our fries even crispier, we should add some vinegar to the water they soak in. I'd heard that before, but I think our fries are plenty crispy. But then, I thought, maybe that'd work on the yams. And it does. After a nice soak in vinegared water, the sweet potatoes fry up crispy without turning too brown. They're still not as orange as the frozen variety, but they're all-natural and tasty.