The year is 2014 and I am a food blogger.
So, obviously, I bought a spiralizer. It was inevitable.
And oh, how I love it. The ease with which things tumble out of that thing never fails to delight me. I just want to spiralize everything.
My first experiment was a cucumber. It was fantastic. Paper thin shreds of cucumber! I drizzled a dill and yogurt sauce on top. Amazing.
So now that I’ve done the healthy thing, I can move on to the real reason I bought this beautiful machine.
Curly fries. Oh yes.
Curly fries take me back to my university days. Do you remember when you were first able to do your own grocery shopping? What an absolute thrill it was. Suddenly I could buy ice cream, sugary cereals, 9 different types of cheese, and… frozen curly fries.
The frozen curly fries usually came out at around 3 in the morning, and occasionally were responsible for setting off the fire alarms in the residence halls. Good times were had by all.
Well, I’ve been doing my own grocery shopping for 13 years now and curly fries fell off the list a long time ago, when I came to appreciate the art of making my own fries. Home cut and chunky, sometimes baked and sometimes deep fried, but always made by my own two hands. There just wasn’t room for those frozen curly fries in my food snobby life anymore.
The spiralizer changes everything.
My old friend the curly fry meets my new friend the home made fry. No longer must they live in different worlds.
In fact, spiralizing a potato is easier than chopping up a potato. I thought it would be hard work to grind that machine into slicing through a potato but nope. Oh no. It just glides through with the greatest of ease.
So the first time I made curly fries at home was, rather appropriately, at midnight. (Midnight is the new 3Am. I’m in my 30’s now OK?)
Mr. Veggie and I had come home from the pub hungry, with some discounted pasties we’d picked up on our way home. Rock ‘n roll. Even in our beer and wine induced hunger, I had curly fries on the table within half an hour. Impressive.
Now, you will have already picked up on this unfortunate fact, but this route to curly fries does throw out something a little less polished than you might get in a restaurant. Or indeed the frozen bag. The fries are a little too thin- the spiralizer is not adjustable, so we have to use whatever settings we have. I also don’t chop them. I just throw what comes out of the spiralizer right on the baking tray to keep it simple. There are some very long stringy bits in there. The consequence is that they don’t cook evenly. There’s some soft bits and some crunchy bits.
It’s kind of a mess, if we’re honest.
But my god are they yummy. Spicy, salty, crunchy/soft, and totally fun to eat with your hands. So I am OK with the imperfection, because it keeps them fun, and keeps them easy.
30 minutes is all it takes, although your oven and my oven might be quite different so… use a little bit of your own judgement too!
Spiralizer Curly Fries
Ingredients
- 3 potatoes
Seasoning
- 1 tsp cornflour
- 1 tsp dried oregano
- 1 tsp smoked paprika
- ½ tsp salt
- ½ tsp sugar
Instructions
- Pre-heat the oven to 180C / 360F.
- Spiralize your potatoes on the medium setting. It will be so much fun. Enjoy it.
- Brush a baking tray with olive oil. Put the spiralized potatoes on the tray, get them as evenly laid out as you can, and brush a very light coat of oil through them.
- Quickly mix together the seasoning, pour it on top of the potatoes and toss to distribute.
- Bake for 15 minutes.
- Remove from oven and, using tongs or a spatula, give the fries a good mix to flip over as many as you can.
- Put back into the oven for another 15 minutes until nicely crisped.
So, no offense to all the veggie pasta recipes I’ve seen… but this is most certainly the best way to use a spiralizer! Brilliant! Totally love the idea of curly fries. Now I need to get this tool!
Christine, I’ve told my wife that we NEED one of these spiralizers, and I must have one for Christmas! Otherwise our lives are sadly lacking something, lol 😉 Here’s hoping Santa is good to me. 😀
Oh my gosh, yes, it’s an essential piece of kit! I definitely recommend the Spiralz brand which you can get on Amazon.co.uk. It slices through everything so easily. It’s almost therapeutic!
Hey Christine, I’ve wanted a spiralizer, but I’ve also seen something called a Benriner (sp) mandoline. Have you used this mandoline? I’m not sure which to get. I mostly want it for making raw noodles from vegetables.
Hi Cathe! I haven’t used that mandoline before but it looks great and has excellent reviews! It would be slightly different in that it would slice them flat instead of curly (the curled slice is what gives some veggies length- things like potato and beet wouldn’t be in long strings if they were sliced flat- it also makes them more full and bouncy looking on the plate!) and in the case of zucchini, you would probably need to core it to avoid a mess of seeds and moisture- whereas the spiralizer works around the core so all of the seeds and wet part are left alone and the noodles come out as dry as possible. But the mandoline is useful for a lot of other things too- so it depends if you want all the other stuff that comes with it? Might also be worth looking on Youtube for videos of people using both devices, it might make more sense if you see them both in use!