And if you can, should you?

In a shocking turn of events, we recently found ourselves with leftover French fries. And we’re not talking about one or two unclaimed fries, but multiple orders of them.

We’re as surprised as anyone, given that SoraNews24 HQ is usually a sort of black hole in which unclaimed food is absorbed and devoured with cosmic-level force. But even our collective company stomach has its limits, and we’d reached them the other day after we noticed we had a whole bunch of free French fry coupons for McDonald’s Japan which were all about to expire, so we used them all at once.

This sudden influx of French fries itself was cause for joy, but as our stomachs filled and our giddiness wore off, we were left with a grim premonition. French fries never taste quite as good after they’ve cooled down and been reheated in the microwave, which meant we now had a couple of sub-par spud snacking sessions in our near future…

…or did we? It’s been said that crisis and opportunity are two sides of the same coin, and so our Japanese-language reporter Ikuna Kamezawa came up with a plan to flip things around. Instead of eating diminished reheated French fries, she would use our leftover McDonald’s fries to make croquettes.

She’d need a few other ingredients to do this: an onion, some ground meat, butter, flour, eggs, breadcrumbs, and cooking oil. Starting with the onion, she peeled and minced it, then added it to a frying pan along with the ground meat (in our case a mixture of ground beef and pork) and butter to sauté them together.

▼ Ikuna used half an onion, about 70 grams (2.5 ounces) of ground meat, and roughly 8 grams (0.3 ounces) of butter.

Now it was time to get our leftover McDonald’s French fries out of the fridge and start them on their path to rebirth. We had two medium-size orders to work with.

Rather than try to mash them up cold, Ikuna put them in the microwave for three minutes so that they’d get very hot. Then she got to mashing with her spatula.

This turned out to be surprisingly difficult. Though the fries were looking droopy and squishy after being reheated, they weren’t easy to crush with the spatula.

Ultimately, Ikuna ended up using the spatula’s edge to stab at the fries, rather than trying to press on them with the flat face. After about 10 minutes, they looked like this.

The next step was to combine the quasi-mashed potatoes with the sautéed meat and onions…

…and then to form the croquettes, which Ikuna did by hand, placing a scoop of the mixture in her palm and pressing it like she would when making a rice ball. Our two medium-sized orders of fries were enough to make six croquettes.

However, maybe because the fries weren’t completely mashed, the croquette cores Ikuna formed felt like they were on the verge of crumbling almost immediately. This meant there was a ticking clock as she applied their breading, and she moved as quickly as she could to cover the croquettes first in a layer of flour, then a coating of egg, and finally an outer layer of breadcrumbs.

Now all that was left was the final step, frying them in oil for three or four minutes, after which her leftover McDonald’s French fry croquettes were complete!

Ikuna, by the way, would like us to remind everyone that her croquettes do not look sloppy or unprofessional at all, but are simply bursting with rustic homemade charm.

So, how do they taste?

Not bad! But also not really great…?

First thing first: they do taste like croquettes, so in terms of answering the simple question of whether or not you can use leftover McDonald’s fries to make croquettes, the answer is “Yes!”

However, the flavor was definitely on the mild side. As you might have noticed, Ikuna didn’t add any salt to her croquettes, figuring that the McDonald’s fries were probably already salty enough on their own. However, she also didn’t add any pepper, which is a common croquette ingredient but not something that the McDonald’s fries were bringing to the party by themselves.

There was also a bit of a discordancy between the mild flavor of Ikuna’s croquettes and how oily they were, perhaps owing to the potato part now being twice-fried. The potato filling was also noticeably firmer than it is with conventional croquettes made with mashed potatoes.

But again, they weren’t bad, and when Ikuna added some of the Worcester-like sauce used for croquettes in Japan, the overall eating experience was pretty good, at least in line with normal croquette expectations.

So since we’ve already answered that you can do it, the next question is whether or not you should make croquettes with leftover McDonald’s fries, and the answer to that isn’t quite as simple as “Yes” or “No.” Using McDonald’s fries didn’t grant our croquettes any special magical qualities beyond the results you could expect with using regular potatoes and mashing them, so we wouldn’t go out of our way and make a French fry run with the specific premeditated purpose of using them as croquette ingredients.

But on the other hand, the croquettes we made did taste pretty good, and this was definitely more fun than wistfully eating a plate of limp leftover fries that had been reheated in the microwave. So in the unlikely event that we ever end up with leftover fries again, we’ll definitely have to keep the croquette option in mind.

Photos ©SoraNews24
● Want to hear about SoraNews24’s latest articles as soon as they’re published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter!
[ Read in Japanese ]