Foodie Friday: PA-Style Cheese Fries

I grew up in South Central Pennsylvania, where there’s an overabundance of what I refer to as pizza food–this would be things like pizza (duh), cheeseburger subs, tuna melts, and my favorite thing ever–cheese fries. In the area where I was raised, cheese fries are made by piling mounds of mozzarella on a plate of fries, and baking them until the cheese gets all melty and kind of crispy and burnt on the edges (read: f’ing amazing).

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Anyway, because the words “cheese fries” conjures an image of mozzarella tenderly hugging each fry and getting all stringy and messy when pulling one from the bunch, I always want to order cheese fries when I see them on a menu. Unfortunately, this often ends in disappointment for me because what I typically get is a pile of fries with some disgusting orange “cheese”-type thing poured over top, resulting in a gross fluorescent mess.

This was exactly the case-in-point when I was in Chicago and went for a Chicago-style dog. The menu touted cheese fries and I got overly excited (because honestly, I haven’t seen like, anywhere in Austin that does cheese fries!) and immediately ordered them without reminding myself that it was probably going to be some weird substance squirt all over the fries. One of my sisters recently told me that she was watching a special on TV where they described that this cheese-like substance actually only contains about 1% of real cheese per 1000-pound vat. So I use the term “cheese” very lightly here (I’m also a total cheese snob, in case you hadn’t picked up on that).

So, I got stuck with this messy pile of congealed sauce making the actual fries soggy and gross. I essentially picked out the non-cheesed fries and left the rest for my then-boyfriend to eat (because he’d seriously eat anything you put in front of him).

Are you a fan of this variety of cheese fries?