Fry-Day, I'm In Love

Everyone loves fries.

It's kind of our go to national thing when we want to be full, we want grease and salt and we can't really think of anything else to do the trick. For the most part, properly cooked, fries are delicious. Whether you like them with ketchup, dijon mustard (never yellow, that stuff is the devil's bile), mayonnaise, aioli (a fancy way of saying flavored mayonnaise), truffle salt, sea salt, whatever, fries are delicious. Oil, salt, potato, rinse repeat.

They may not be good for you, but we kind of already know that. Call them a necessary delicious evil. Whether you realize it or not, we are now in the golden age of fried food. To what do we have to thank for this period of crispy enlightenment? The air fryer. Essentially a blast furnace meets a convection oven, with a minute fraction of the oil it takes to traditionally fry, you have peak deliciousness. Now, even with an air fryer, most of these are still starchy doom, but hey, we can't all be Jack Lalanne (this reference circa 1958). So I say, enjoy those fried foods with 30% less calories. In fact, you should enjoy them in this order, so I present to you the definitive ranking of fries, in order, editorialized. It's worth noting that these are ranked based on how they taste with salt and ketchup.

1. The Steak Fry

Found usually in some sort of deli, the granddaddy, Mona Lisa and Taj Mahal of fries, when properly crispy, are peak deliciousness. Golden brown, crunchy yet soft, blending spectacularly well with ketchup. It's the rare fry you can eat just one of at a time and be satisfied with the speed of your fry intake.

2. The Tater Tot

A staple of the high school cafeteria, tater tots are the perfect fried companion to pretty much anything. Properly prepared, it's supreme crunchiness. They are the only one that may be better without ketchup and are wonderful in an air fryer with just a little salt. Worth noting that tater tots are actually number one in the following states: Colorado, Washington, Alaska, Oregon, California, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Michigan, Vermont, Illinois, Arizona, Montana, New Jersey, Virginia, New York, New Mexico and Connecticut.

3. The Traditional (Classic or Thick)

This is your good ol' all-American fry (thanks France, I mean Belgium). Think McDonald's, think your local standard burger joint. It's the essence of fries. The kind of fry you look at the bottom of the bag and get that one crappy burnt one and you feel like you've just discovered King Tut's gold.

4. The Crinkle Cut

Crinkle cut fries are delicious, but for some reason they are the fry most likely to come out undercooked and end up a mushy on the inside oil ridged potato thing. OR, they end up with the ends burnt and the inside under-cooked? I'm not sure why these horrible fates befall this ridged buddy, but if not for those issues, this would be higher.

5. The Waffle Fry

The waffle fry is the Alaska of fries. It's got the most amount of surface area, yet the least amount of usable fry itself (for this and other extremely poor metaphors please call...). If you want pure crunch without all that pesky potato flavor, this is for you. Basically this is a ketchup delivery device.

6. The Wedge

The potato wedge is the "when it's good it's great, when it's bad, ptooey" of fries. In the proper hands, say like the food lab geniuses at KFC, these rule. Leave the skin on, fry them like heck, and make sure the inside is still light and boom, tasty fun. But don't do that and you're left with a mouthful of undercooked baked potato. Blech. Also, the best fry with rosemary and/or garlic.

7. The Cottage Fry

Honestly, I don't come across these all too much. They seem nice, harmless, sorta like that little old couple who lives in a cute little cottage down the street, with a well maintained lawn and some roses lining the fence? Perhaps they can double as a coaster in a pinch? Simply for the fact that I don't have much of an opinion, let's just put them in the middle of the pack.

8. The Shoestring

Shoestring fries are for people who want to appear fancy. I'm not sure why fancy food is always cut so small. Fancy fries are small, fancy fruit salad is small, fancy sandwiches are small. The only benefit that shoestrings have going for them are they taste great in spicy mustard. You have to cram like forty-five of these suckers in your mouth to equal the potato pleasure factor of one steak fry.

9. Sweet Potato Fry

Sweet potato fries are the definition of meh. Like, you think, wow, how exotic, an orange french fry that's sweet And you taste it and you're like, not salty enough, and ketchup makes zero sense on this? What's the point?

If you have to dip something in ranch dressing to make it palatable, then you should not exist. It's like the French Bulldog of fries.

10. The Curly Fry

Curly fries shapewise are perfectly fine. Yay, curly, it's fun like a curly straw, but then some asshat decided that all curly fries have to have some vaguely sweet flavor with like cinnamon and paprika or something (I'm looking at you, Arby's). The only seasoning fries need is salt. End of Story. And maybe truffle salt. End of Story again. Or maybe garlic and parmesan, definitely End of Story. Curly fries are gross.

1,156,342. Battered Seasoned Fries

I'm not sure who the genius is who came up with this craptastic unholy idea but these are just the worst side dish known to man. Let's take a perfectly delicious piece of potato, that fries PERFECTLY fine on it's own, then add in some flour batter and terrible spices and ruin whatever it's covering. No thank you. Seriously. These are terrible. Let's all stop buying these, so that whoever the monster is who came up with this abomination has so many left in their warehouse that their storage fees accumulate to the point where they simply stop making them. Then the ones in the storage turn rotten or get eaten by rats with terrible taste in food. Boom. The end of this junk as we know. it. Who's with me?

Honorable Mention

This guy.