Make French Fries Identical To Martha Stewart's Using This One Oil Tip

Homemade french fries can be something of a white whale for home cooks — sometimes, without a whole bunch of time to go through a lengthy triple cooking process, or the industrial grade equipment you might find in a professional kitchen, it can be difficult to get the right consistency and cook. Let's face it — the fries you make at home just never quite taste as good as the ones you get in a restaurant, do they?

The thing is, though, with the right ingredients you can make legitimately crispy french fries at home that rival the ones you might find in a restaurant — and a helpful tip for how to achieve that comes from none other than Martha Stewart. In a segment of her "Martha's Cooking School" series on YouTube, Stewart suggests that when making french fries, using the right oil is an essential step. You might not think that oil is all that important compared to, say, what kind of potato you use, or how you season your fries once they're cooked, but it really is important: Not all oils are created equal.

For the perfect Martha Stewart-style french fries, you need an oil with a high smoke point, which will allow you to get it extremely hot without burning (and thus without affecting the flavor of your fries.) Think oils like peanut, sunflower, or grapeseed. That heat is important to develop a crispy, golden crust on the outside of your fries whilst keeping the inside fluffy and delicate — the holy grail for the perfect at-home french fry.

The smoke point of your oil is obviously crucial when it comes to getting the crispy, perfectly cooked finish that you want on your french fries — just like Martha Stewart does — but it's not the only important step. The flavor of the oil is important, too. Stewart recommends choosing an oil with a neutral flavor, which will make for the most pure tasting, salty, potato-y french fries possible.

Avoid olive oil for french fries, for example. Though the idea that olive oil has a low smoke point and thus is unsuitable for searing is something of a misconception (its smoke point is actually easily high enough for pretty much everything you might cook at home, and certainly high enough to fry in,) the reason why you won't want to use it for making french fries actually has to do with its flavor. Olive oil has a lovely nutty, grassy, subtly peppery flavor — which while absolutely delicious in its own right (and perfect for making crispy, Italian potato dishes like Frico, for example) it's not what you want for that classic french fry flavor.

Instead, opt for something like canola oil, which will help showcase the natural flavor of the potato itself, providing a relatively neutral base perfect for hitting with lashings of salt and dunking in a pot of fresh, tangy, homemade mayonnaise (or an aioli, if you're feeling like a funky, garlicky flavor boost!)

Of course, neutral oil isn't the only option available to you for delicious, crispy french fries. In fact, why not take a cue from some of the world's best restaurants (or, indeed, British fish and chip shops) and use a different type of fat entirely: Beef tallow. Martha Stewart's website gave this delicious (and highly underrated, if you ask us) cooking fat their seal of approval, and it's no wonder why. Beef tallow is both stable at high temperatures (so you can get that perfect crispy finish that you want from a great french fry) and delicious — with a rich, beefy, fatty flavor that pairs perfectly with potato, introducing a new depth and surprisingly delicious complexity to your fries. Beef tallow fries are especially good when paired with steak and a classic peppercorn sauce.

If you want an even more luxurious kick, try swapping that beef tallow for duck fat. Another animal fat that's stable at high temperatures (with a smoke point of around 375 degrees Fahrenheit, making it ideal for deep fat frying), it adds a truly decadent flavor to your potatoes. Traditionally, you'll find duck fat used when making the absolute best roast potatoes, and it's obviously not going to be a particularly cost effective option if you make homemade french fries on the regular — but if you fancy going all out for a special occasion, you'll truly have some french fries to remember.