Turn Frozen Fries Into The Ultimate Comfort Food With One Canned Addition

When you're craving crispy, salty goodness, a bag of frozen french fries can hit the spot like few other foods. You can munch them by the handful with your dipping sauce of choice or load them with any number of toppings; you can even take your taste buds south of the border by making chorrillana, a Chilean loaded fry dish topped with steak and caramelized onions. Another option for loading your fries with decadent flavor that you may not have considered is making a rich gravy from canned French onion soup.

French fries and gravy is a classic combination, from British chips and gravy to Quebecois poutine or New Jersey disco fries. Adding canned French onion soup takes an already classic meal and elevates it into a comfort food masterpiece.

All you need to make this rich, cozy topping for your fries is a can of French onion soup, cornstarch, maybe some water, and your cheese of choice. Bring the soup to a boil while adding the cornstarch slurry incrementally until it reaches your desired thickness, then coat the fries in the gravy and top it all with cheese. If you time your fries right, the piping hot potatoes and gravy-soup reduction should be enough to melt the cheese, but if not, you can throw the combination in the microwave, broiler, or air fryer to finish it off. This gravy can also be made using an onion soup mix powder, combined with water, and adding flour or cornstarch to thicken the sauce.

This french fry and French onion gravy combination is more versatile than you might expect. There are lots of interesting and fun twists to add to turn it from comfort snack to full meal. The simplest switch is to add cheese curds or Wisconsin bread cheese to bring this closer to a classic poutine, but that's hardly where the creativity ends.

Onion gravy is a staple of both British and Southern cooking, which allows for countless variations for a french fry and gravy base. While bangers and mash with onion gravy may traditionally use mashed potatoes (hence the name), you can chop the sausages up, add them atop the bed of fries, and cover them in gravy for a fun twist on the British classic. The same goes for meatloaf, pot roast, or chicken fried steak. These choices will take your loaded fries into the stratosphere while providing fun reimaginings of familiar dishes.

For a ridiculously indulgent, emphatically delicious twist on a classic chicken and waffles, load a waffle iron with a layer of fries and cheese to make a solid crust of cheesy waffle fries that will act as the bread in a fried chicken sandwich smothered in onion gravy. What this dish lacks in lightness or subtlety it will make up for in crunchy, mouth-watering flavor.