Curly French Fry Cutter

In the year 1802, Thomas Jefferson described a dinner at the White House. He wrote about differently cooked potatoes, by commenting that, the 'potatoes were served in a French manner'. This was probably the introduction of French fries, a new potato recipe in the United States.

French fries is a delicacy that has found an important place in the modern fast food industry. The concept of French fries originated in Belgium and gradually spread all across the world. This delicacy has many other alternative names such as chips, fried potato and steak fries. The concept of French fries grew very popular in Europe after the 19th century. In the mid 20th century, traditional restaurants in Europe and United States began changing into fast food chains and started churning out the famous 'burger'. The burger started becoming available in many different varieties like the hamburger or cheeseburger. Another extremely famous fast food was the 'taco', a Mexican innovation. The French fries were an excellent side dish or accompaniment for any kind of fast food, taco or burger, in United States. Today the fast food industry all over the United States of America produces billions of tonnes of French fries every year. At the same time, parallel to the development of the American fast food industry, the Europeans were using French fries or chips as an accompaniment for fish. This famous dish, fish and chips, have become so famous, that it is served in almost every restaurant in Europe.

French fries are usually straight cut pieces of potato that are eaten with a variety of dishes like burgers, salads, fish, chicken, bacon and almost any main course. There are also a variety of preparation methods that are followed, like deep fried French fries, sweet potato French fries, baked fries and many others. One of the methods of preparation that I grew particularly fond of, was the curly French fries. However, these kind of French fries are not available in many places and hence I decided to purchase a curly French fry cutter.

Due to its wide spread consumption, it has also led to the innovation of many different types of French fry cutters. The curly French fry cutter is certainly a very simple piece of kitchen cutlery which is very simple to operate.

A normal French fry cutter, cuts along the longitudinal axis of any potato, making the pieces rectangular in shape. In this mechanism the potato passes through a set of blades and makes the fries as uniform as possible. The mechanism of the curly French fry cutter is a bit different. Just like naughty school children, this cutter believes in keeping the fries, natural, non-uniform and in a helical spiral shape. Unlike the normal French fry cutters, the curly French fry cutter does not go through a set of blades. In this situation a single blade is used to cut the potato along its natural surface. This cutting along a curved shape causes the French fry to become curly. The are many varieties of the curly French fry cutters that are available, like the cutter that is placed and secured on the table using vacuum cups, or the one that can be permanently screwed on top of the kitchen platform. I purchased the one that can be attached to the table of platform using a clamp. The best feature of this curly French fry cutter is that, you can easily and comfortably, make curly fries from the potato without breaking the curl. Its is also easy to detach it from the table and clean it.

My family certainly enjoyed the fries that I made with the help of my new curly French fry cutter. Another suggestion to it is that the curly French fries go extremely well with cheese, sour cream or even plain and simple ketchup.