French fries are one of those things that should be easy, but are hard to get right. You’ve got to use the right potatoes, you have to cut them right and you have to cook them for the right amount of time at the right temperature. The Joy of Cooking suggests using baking potatoes, since they are higher in starch. I have also read that it is preferable to use older potatoes: potatoes that have been sitting in a dark pantry for awhile and lost a little moisture, so their skin is not tight. It will have a little sponginess to it. But I am not finding anything about that on the Web.

Let’s start with the simplest possible french fry recipe:

Perfect french fries (by Emeril Lagasse)

All it contains is peeled potatoes, oil, salt and pepper. You want to cook fries at a lower temperature (325 F here) and a longer time (say eight minutes) so that you can remove a lot of moisture and make them crispy. If you go with a higher temperature, they will darken too fast. Emeril is using a twice-cooked approach.

Alton Brown has this recipe for battered french fries, and also goes into a lot of detail on equipment, proper cutting technique and temperatures:

Part 2

Salting and Seasoning french fries is its own art:

If you want to try oven-fried potatoes to lower the fat content, here’s seasoned oven fries:

[Note - if you replace the "squish the oil and seasonings onto the potatoes with your hands" part with "throw it all in a ziplock bag and shake", then cleanup is a lot easier]

Finally, if you want to try making McDonald’s-style french fries, and you want to bake them to lower fat content a little, here is a recipe from the book Fast Food Fix:

Recipe: Devin Alexander’s McDonald’s Fries.

More on the book:

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