When I make burgers I want fries. Potato “fries”. Even though, I don’t fry things . . . I bake ’em, I love fries with my burgers. I do love baked “fries”. But I also don’t always like to have potatoes because we are having buns. I don’t do my burgers protein style. Half the fun of a burger (to me) is the bun. Often times I will make other types of fries, like Baked Golden Beet “Fries” or Squash Sticks (even though I breaded these). Now, I don’t really think of corn as a vegetable, I mean, I know it is a vegetable, but I think of it as a starch. I think of potatoes and corn in the same kinda category. So, this isn’t really a great replacement for potatoes fries . . . if I am thinking starch, but they were good. My husband really liked them. I made polenta fries.
I had purchased a tube of polenta a week or maybe more ago. The idea for which I bought the polenta changed. Do you ever do that? Buy an ingredient for one thing but then change your mind. Then you are stuck with that ingredient wondering what to do with it. I turned to Google looking up how to cook tube polenta. If you look up polenta it has ideas on how to cook the porridge style polenta. Usually polenta is corn meal mush. But if you buy it in a tube it is a solid. My search led me to Our Everyday Life that gave three different ways to cook polenta from a tube, oven fries was one of them. I didn’t even read the full recipe because I figured I could do it.
Here is what I did, next time I will use less oil . . . and now that I look at the recipe on the website it calls for no oil, but I want crispy fries so I will continue to use oil, just less.
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Oven Polenta Fries
1 tube of polenta
olive oil
garlic salt
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Preheat the oven to 450° F. After cutting the polenta out of the tube cut the tube in half, then cut the polenta into 1/4 of an inch strips. Try to cut the whole tube into equal sized strips.
Then spread the strips out on the pan. Sprinkle with a little oil. Sprinkle with the garlic salt. Place pan in the oven. Let the fries bake for 15 minutes. Then take the pan out of the oven and turn the fries. Then put it back in the oven for another 15 minutes. Then check the fries. If they are done to your liking, take them out and serve. If you want them cooked more, flip ’em or toss them on the pan, then put it in for 10 (or whatever) minutes.
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Of course ovens vary and people desires of doneness varies so keep an eye on them and cook them to your liking. Also, try your favorite seasoning. Mine is garlic salt. Presently I have garlic salt with parsley in it, so that was good. Also . . . I used garlic basil polenta. Again, I didn’t buy the tube for the fries so it was not a plain flavor. But I might try that next time.
As with many of my food posts, I didn’t plan on blogging about this. I did snap a few pictures after they had already been baking, but I didn’t document it from the beginning, but really that would have just been the tube of polenta. I did take a few shots of them on my plate, but I really like my husband’s shots, so I am using his, too!
What do you do with a tube of polenta? Share, please, I need some ideas!
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