Duckin' Fun Fries

Nothing is more fun than breaking out the deep fryer. On the other hand, nothing is less fun than cleaning up the slick and sticky coating of grease all over your kitchen. For this reason, here at the Chicago Chapter of TFK we prefer to make our French fries in the oven. They look every bit as lovely as deep fried fries and w/ attention can be just as good:

The general technique is to thinly slice potatoes and lay them in a thin layer of fat on a cookie sheet in a hot oven. This is what I use whenever possible:

Duck fat! I collected it from a duck I roasted a while back. It is delicious and does a wonderful job of browning anything that cooks it. Oven fried potatoes are so easy to make it hardly merits a recipe. First thing you wanna do is heat up your oven as hot as it can go. My goes up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit so that's what I use. In the meantime, chop up some potatoes. They can be wide but you need to make them thin and even, about a quarter inch thick. Once you have your potatoes cut up, put a blob of duck fat on your cookie sheet (or oil or whatever you are cooking in) and put it in the oven for a minute or two to preheat. Lay out the potatoes on a single layer over the sheet like so:

The oil should be at least completely coating the bottom of the pan preferably a little more. These fries take longer than you'd expect to cook. I start checking the first side after ten minutes and it normally takes about fifteen or so. Once it is golden brown on the downward side, flip them w/ a spatula and the other side normally browns in another five to ten minutes.Transfer these to a rack for a minute to cool an allow some of the excess fat to drip off and serve. Don't salt the fries until they are plated, that way you can save the druck fat or cooking oil for later use.