6 Knives And Tools You Need To Effortlessly Cut Potatoes Into Fries

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Why do french fries nearly always taste better when you get them from a restaurant? Most likely, it's because you're not taking quite the same care with your homemade fries. This is understandable since you probably don't make hundreds or thousands of batches per day — and practice does make perfect. Still, there are steps you can take to make fast food-worthy french fries at home. The process starts with choosing the right potato for your fries (russets are best), and finishes with a double fry to make your fries extra crispy. In between these two stages, however, lies the crucial component of a proper cut.

Just about everyone has a favorite french fry style, be it straight, crinkle, or super-thin shoestring. Unfortunately, slicing these shapes can be tedious and difficult, or downright impossible in the case of waffle fries. (Are you supposed to hand-carve each indent, or what?) A good knife is an essential tool, but a french fry cutter can help you produce fries that are not only your preferred style, but in most cases, are also of similar size, so they cook at the same rate. (Of the tools on our list, the chef's knife and crinkle cutter are the only ones where you'll need to gauge the thickness yourself.) These knives and gadgets all work in different ways to produce a variety of potato shapes, but each one has the potential to take your fry game to the next level.

If you make the occasional batch of fries for homemade poutine or to accompany a perfectly crispy smash burger, a manual fry cutter may be your best bet. I own such a cutter, although our pick — the Sopito professional potato cutter — is quite a step up from my bargain buy; My cutter has plastic housing (which hasn't held up too well) and this one is stainless steel.

To use this cutter, you put a peeled potato in the chamber, then push a lever to force it through a sharp, metal grate that neatly slices it into long, rectangular shapes. While some cutters (mine, for example) are shorter — and may require you to cut the potato in half — this model has a chamber over five and a half inches long so most potatoes will probably fit. It also makes for longer, more aesthetically pleasing fries, versus the squarish ones that mine produces. The Sopito fry cutter is also sturdy enough that you can use it to make sweet potato fries, which is by no means a given with flimsier cutters.

Once you get the hang of making homemade fries, you may want to make them on a more regular basis. If you find yourself cutting potatoes every day or so, it might be worth upgrading to an electric fry cutter like the Sopito commercial grade electric french fry cutter. Such a gadget would also be useful for eliminating the strength or mobility required to operate a manual cutter. (You do need to put some oomph into it, in order to push a potato through a metal grate.)

This Sopito electric french fry cutter is designed along the same lines as the manual version. But one significant difference is that once you place your potato in the box, you don't need to pull a lever. Instead, you simply press a button and a motor does the potato pushing. Reviewers praise the motor's strength and note that it makes short work of preparing multiple potatoes. In fact, this cutter is powerful enough to use with unpeeled potatoes. Since potato skins are loaded with fiber, and peeling's a tedious chore, skin-on fries are a trend worth getting behind.

At last, we're finally going to learn the secret of making waffle fries — and crinkle fries, too! It may seem mysterious, but a crinkle cutter will allow you to slice both types of fries with ease. Best of all, this simple tool can be snagged on a budget. Our pick, the Nax Caki crinkle cutter, typically sells for less than $10.

A crinkle cutter, at its most basic, looks like nothing more than a corrugated piece of metal attached to a handle. But the magic really begins once you guide the blade through the potato. With a simple straight cut, you can make oven fries shaped like your favorite crinkle-cut potato chips. For waffle fries, simply alternate the cutting direction by rotating the potato 90 degrees with each cut. You can create crinkle fries by using the crinkle cutter to slice the potato into slabs, then again into sticks. 

Crinkle cutters may be a little more hands-on than one-step fry cutters, but the results are quite impressive. They're also versatile enough to use on carrots, cucumbers, and radishes to make a fancy garden salad.

You know the world needs more tornado potatoes, AKA potato twisters or spiral fries. Sure, you can get them at any fair or festival, but there's no need to wait for a summer weekend to enjoy them. They're actually not that difficult to DIY as long as you've got the right type of potato cutter.

The easiest way to make tornado potatoes is with a spiral cutter like the RioRand twisted potato slicer. You can achieve this fun shape by threading your potato onto a metal spike, sliding the spike into place, and turning a hand crank. This forces the potato through a blade shaped to cut the potato into one long twist that's ready for the fryer. The RioRand slicer even includes wooden skewers to insert into your spiralized potatoes before frying. Eating them off the stick is the fun part, after all. Well, that, and deciding what type of sauce to dip them in. Decisions, decisions ...

A mandoline slicer is a versatile tool that can be used to chop all manner of vegetables. And, depending on what attachments you have, it can also make several styles of french fries. 

For standard-style fries, you'll use a square, straight blade measuring about ¼-inch. You'll also need to halve the potato lengthwise before pushing it through the blade. If you want to try cutting shoestring fries, you'll do the exact same thing, only using the julienne setting with a square, straight blade measuring about ⅛-inch. If you have a wavy blade, you can even make waffle fries. In this case, you'll halve the potato widthwise and rotate it 90 degrees between each slice, the same as you'd do with a crinkle cutter.

The Gramercy Kitchen Company mandoline comes with a wavy blade for all of your crinkle-cutting needs. It also has two julienne settings, the smaller of which will make perfect shoestring fries. As an added bonus, this slicer comes with a pair of cut-resistant gloves to protect you against injury. We don't want anything coming between you and the french fries of your dreams.

If your kitchen or budget are on the small side and you don't want to purchase a single-use gadget just for slicing potatoes, it's possible to cut straight-edged fries by hand, using a chef's knife. It just so happens to be one of the crucial knives you should already have in your kitchen. The best way to hand-cut fries is to halve the potato lengthwise, then slice each piece into slabs about half an inch thick. Stack the slabs from half a potato, cut them into fries, and repeat the process with the other half of the potato.

If your chef's knife isn't up to par — or you don't yet own one — you needn't break the bank buying a chef-recommended knife that could cost hundreds of dollars. Our pick is the Tramontina Pro Series Forged 8-inch Chef Knife, which is made of high-carbon steel, in Brazil. These knives are sturdy, long-lasting, hold a sharp edge, and generally perform well above their price point. You and your future homemade french fries deserve the most bang for your buck.