Sweet Potato Fries

I have a passion for french fries.  Love them.  Adore them.  They are a real weakness for me.  While I have managed to break myself of the Sonic french fry habit that added at least 5 pounds to my hips about 5 years ago, DH and I still have oven fries on a regular basis, at least once a week.  It occurs to me I haven’t made a post here on my favorite oven fry recipe…  Makes note to self.

In any event, I am always on the lookout for ways to make fries more healthy, and one obvious route is to make them from sweet potatoes.  Now I tried this once before with lousy results, so I never made them again.  However, during our recent trip to Savannah, I had sweet potato fries (by accident–I had ordered the regular fries, but hey we’ll take it as a Sign) at The Distillary (which, incidentally, makes a fantastic cheeseburger) and loved them.   I had a whole bag of sweet potatoes in the pantry, so I decided to try them again.

But how to season them?  And how long to cook them?

Well, I recently saw an episode of Cook Yourself Thin on Lifetime (which I have developed an addiction to–they’ve got some awesome recipes on there), and they said the secret ingredient was chili powder.  This would never have occurred to me, but I decided to try it.  The results were marvelous, so much so that I’m making a batch of those alone for lunch today (since the original batch did not survive long enough to be photographed).

Ingedients:

  • 2 small sweet potatoes, well scrubbed, with any funky spots cut off, skin on (about 7 oz.)
  • 1 tsp olive oil
  • garlic powder
  • chili powder
  • kosher salt
  • fresh ground black pepper

Directions:

  1. Preheat the oven to 425.
  2. Slice the potatoes thin (think a little larger than shoestring fries).
  3. Coat with the olive oil (a little bit goes further than you think)
  4. On top of your baking sheet, layer some wire cooling racks (this is the same method I use for my homemade tortilla chips).  This keeps you from having to flip the fries during cooking.
  5. Layer your fries over the racks.
  6. Sprinkle with salt, pepper, garlic powder, and chili powder (to taste).
  7. Bake for 25-30 minutes.  Keep an eye on them until you know how your oven cooks.  You don’t want to burn them.

Serves 1.  These work out to 210 calories and 4.7 grams of fat.

Printable version.

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