Before the fat
Potatoes
Floury ones, stored ones, kept somewhere cool but not cold. Get this wrong and nothing later on will save it.
Floury, always
Fries want a floury potato, the kind that falls apart if you boil it too long: lots of starch, not much water. In the shops here the bag tells you. Look for bloemig or kruimig, or simply the word friet on the label. Waxy salad potatoes are lovely and completely wrong for this.
In England, Maris Piper and King Edward do the job. My sister uses Maris Piper and swears it’s the same. It isn’t quite, but it’s close.
What I’ve used
All from shops and markets around Ghent. My notes, not a ranking.
| Potato | Flesh | My notes |
|---|---|---|
| Bintje | pale yellow, floury | The old one. Rik won’t use anything else. Big and knobbly, now and then hollow in the middle. The fries I compare everything to. |
| Agria | deep yellow, floury | Easy to find in supermarkets. A touch sweeter and colours faster, so watch the second fry. |
| Markies | light yellow, floury | On sacks at the market in winter. Even and reliable, no surprises either way. |
| Fontane | light yellow, fairly floury | A lot of the frozen-fries world runs on it, I’m told. Perfectly decent at home. |
| Charlotte, Nicola | yellow, waxy | Lovely potatoes. Not for this. They go glassy inside and refuse to crisp. |
| Anything sold as new | watery | No. See the log, June 2026. |
About Bintje
Bintje is the old standard on both sides of the Dutch border, bred in Friesland a little over a hundred years ago by a schoolteacher who named it after one of his pupils. It is big, pale and floury, and it makes the fries most people here grew up on. Farmers grow less of it now because it catches most of the diseases going, so it can take some finding. Rik buys a sack from the same farm stall every October and lectures anyone who asks why.
Old potatoes, not new
The best fry potatoes are stored ones, from late summer through to spring. New potatoes, the thin-skinned early ones of May and June, hold too much water and too little starch, so they go limp and brown in patches. I have learned this more than once (see the log).
Keep them out of the fridge
Store potatoes somewhere cool, dark and airy, but not cold. Below about 6 to 8 °C they start turning starch into sugar, and sugary potatoes brown too fast in the fryer and taste faintly sweet. If yours have been somewhere cold, a week at room temperature mostly puts it right.
Cut away green patches and sprouts. A potato that is green all over goes in the bin, not the fryer.
Cutting
Belgian fries are thicker than fast-food ones. I aim for 10 to 12 mm square, about the width of my little finger. A wall-mounted cutter with a lever makes it a two-second job; Rik’s is screwed to the shed door. Without one, square off the potato, cut it into slabs, then the slabs into sticks.
Rinse the cut fries until the water runs clear and dry them well. Some people soak them for half an hour first. I can’t taste the difference, but I do it when there’s time.
How much to buy
I am bad at guessing this, so I wrote a helper. A proper meal is about 250 g of cut fries a person, and it adds a fifth for the peelings.
Portion helper
About 1.3 kg of potatoes
Unpeeled, as they come out of the sack, for 4 people. Roughly a fifth goes in the peelings.
- Cut fries
- 1000 g
- Batches
- 3
- Start to finish
- about 55 min
The rest overlaps: the first batch rests while the others have their first fry.