Cooking Game: The Cheesy Fries of Supreme Joy

Here’s a killer dish that will have everyone complaining loudly that they should not eat it, but they will eat it anyway with little groans of pleasure. It’s that good.

The dish is made in five layers. The waffle fry layer, the cheese sauce layer, the bacon layer, the scallion sprinkle and finally the sour cream meteorite is balanced on top. It looks like this…

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The Cheesy Fries of Supreme Joy

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At this point I’m pretty hopeful that you can figure out how to bake a bag or two of waffle fries in the oven, can figure out how to fry up some crispy bacon?, can chop a few scallions and can operate a spoon with intent toward the sour cream. (It is after all man’s use of tools that separates him from the animals.)

The secret to this dish is the cheese sauce. This is no plastic cheese “spread” invented by the military with the demand that it does not freeze at -40F or get too runny at 120F . This is not grated cheese that one has simply heated into a mix of warm cheese, melted cheese and a hardened post-cheese residue. This is a proper cheese sauce that slowly snuggles into the waffle fries and asks if it can sleep over.

So here we go…

Step 1 - Two tablespoons of butter. Melt this in a pot with a low heat.

Step 2 – Two tablespoons of regular flour. Add this a little at a time into the melted butter. Seriously don’t just tip it all in at once, you have to slowly add it in and stir it into a smooth even mix. Stir hard and fast and I find smooshing it against the bottom of the pot with a rubber spatula helpful.

Step 3 – If you did Step 2 right, you’ll have a gray kind of looking smooth paste in the bottom of the pot. Then just spread it out a little on the bottom of the pot and keep it on a low-medium heat and let it heat up to a bubbling paste for about three minutes.

Step 4 – Add one cup of milk. Do this exactly the same way as adding the flour, a little at a time and stir like crazy getting it into a smooth even texture. I said stir like crazy and I mean it. Go go go go go go!

Step 5 – Slowly bring the mixture up to a bubbling simmer and keep it there for two minutes. Keep stirring it once in a while to stop it from scalding on the bottom of the pot.

Once Step 5 is complete, what you have is known as a “White Sauce”. It is vastly improved with cheese.

Step 6 – Remove the pot from the heat and immediately dump in a cup of shredded cheese. Then quickly stir the cheese in. All going to plan, the cheese will melt into the white sauce evenly and transform into a smooth cheesy delicious pourable sauce.

Then obviously toss all the waffle fries onto a plate, pour the cheese sauce over the fries, shovel the bacon on top of that, sprinkle some chopped scallions and then do a huge whoops of sour cream in the middle of Mt.Cholesterol and you’re done.

The serving dish in the photo above is actually our Thanksgiving Dinner turkey platter, and involved two bags of waffle fries, a double batch of the cheese sauce and a whole thing of bacon. It was a little much for the four of us. Would probably be good for a full dinner for about six or seven people. What an opening salvo for a Halloween party though, I mean lets be honest, candy is no good with beer.

It scales easily as well. Want to serve 12 people? 20 people? 40 people? A bag of fries = a batch of the sauce as a loose rule. Get a big metal serving tray and you can cook up a ton of fries and bacon and just up the quantity of the sauce and pour it all on and you’re good to go. Great for wakes.