CHARLESTON — Charlie Layton was stressing out about how to serve a ubiquitous side dish Americans adore: french fries.
The executive chef of Basic Kitchen tasked a prep cook with producing the health-conscious restaurant’s sweet potato fries. He described making them by hand as “a backbreaking task” that typically began at 4 a.m.
Whole sweet potatoes were first cut and stored. Next, they were rinsed of their excess starch, blanched and dipped in a coating for a crunchier fry. When it was all said and done, the process was about 10 steps, Layton said.
With nearly half of Basic Kitchen’s diners adding french fries to their order, the restaurant was going through 80 to 120 whole sweet potatoes every two days.
“We soon realized it was not a viable option,” Layton said.
Other chefs and restaurant owners have come to a similar conclusion. Frank Kline, owner of North Charleston’s The Grit Counter and Mount Pleasant’s Grace & Grit, once served hand-cut fries at the latter Southern-inspired establishment. It wasn’t long before he and his chefs suspended the operation to focus on other parts of the menu.
The Naughty Burger with sweet potato fries at Basic Kitchen.
Provided
Producing house-made fries is a “much bigger challenge than most people realize,” Kline said. Layton agreed.
When Basic Kitchen prep cooks started to quit, the English-born chef looked for a more efficient way to serve sweet potato fries without sacrificing quality. He discovered the frozen spuds supplied by Stolon Superfoods, a North Charleston-based company that specializes in selling seed-oil-free sweet and russet potato frozen french fries to restaurant chefs.
Visit Basic Kitchen today and find sweet potato fries with long, flat sides and crispy edges available as an appetizer or an accompaniment to the restaurant’s grass-fed beef and veggie burgers. The fries, which fall somewhere between a standard medium-thin cut and a thicker British “chip,” taste light and airy without excess grease to weigh them down.
The Wentworth Street destination is one of more than 150 restaurants in the Charleston area to utilize Stolon Superfoods’ sweet potato or classic french fries. Many local diners might be surprised to discover that several restaurants serve frozen french fries, let alone ones produced by the same company.
Yet chefs are increasingly turning to frozen french fries, a trend that has even made its way to France. Stateside, nearly half of U.S.-grown potatoes go into producing frozen products, a 2023 Department of Agriculture study found.
Not all of the companies producing them were created equally.
Some brands stuff their fries with additives or excess fat. Many prepare them by water-blanching the potatoes, stripping the vegetables of nutrients and color that have to be artificially added back in before they hit the freezer.
Stolon Superfoods adopted a different approach, said product specialist and manager Brandon Barker.
Stolon’s fries are steam-blanched rather than water-blanched, he said. They’re then par-fried in avocado oil, frozen at their peak, packaged and sold to chefs who are growingly choosing to pay more for what they view as a premium product.
What sets Stolon apart
Emily Hahn, a former “Top Chef” contestant who previously led the kitchens of multiple Charleston restaurants, was introduced to Stolon when the brand had just a couple hundred Instagram followers. Now, it boasts nearly 17,000.
Hahn was working at Tarvin Seafood when a friend of a friend connected her with a member of the company. They were looking for a chef’s perspective on recipes, as well as help spreading the word.
She was happy to help, especially after a 2021 visit to the North Carolina facility where locally sourced sweet potatoes were transformed into fries that were healthier and tastier than the competition, she said.
Heavy’s Barburger serves Stolon Superfoods sweet potato fries.
File/Gavin McIntyre/Staff
“It was beautiful, and they were living up to their word,” Hahn said. “You can taste that they are very clean, you can taste that they’re well cared for, you can taste the sweet potato — and they’re crispy.”
Though the fries spoke for themselves, Hahn didn’t see Stolon’s rise coming when she left Charleston for Montana, where she works as a private chef. It took years of word-of-mouth marketing to get there.
To raise brand awareness, Barker drove from restaurant to restaurant pitching the products. Early on, he provided chest freezers for storage that would be consistently filled so chefs never ran low.
Barker, a former Charleston chef himself, knew the value of taking the task of producing or sourcing french fries off their hands.
“It was one thing the chef didn’t have to think about,” Barker said. “That was our motto: ‘Never run out, never substitute.’”
As demand for sweet potato fries grew, Stolon began developing its next product line: classic fries made using potatoes sourced from Oregon and Idaho.
‘Seed-oil-free’
The so-called “seed-oil-free” movement has gained momentum in recent years. Prevalent among influencers, luxury wellness resorts and Gen Z diners, the rising popularity has been spurred by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s push to improve food quality standards, in part through a crusade against oils extracted from plant seeds, such as canola and soybean oils.
His claims that they are linked to chronic illness and other health concerns have been refuted by many medical experts. Some nutrition scientists even argue that seed oils are good for you.
The Grit Counter began serving Stolon’s sweet potato fries a few years ago
File/Grace Beahm Alford/Staff
Still, many companies, including Molly Baz’s Ayoh, are swapping seed oils for other options. Stolon Superfoods, for its part, works exclusively with 100 percent avocado oil to make its sweet potato and classic french fries, the latter of which were launched last year.
Now, Charleston-area restaurants can order six different styles, from sweet potato crinkle cuts to russet potato thick fries. If chefs fry the frozen spuds in a seed-oil-free fat, such as avocado or olive oil, the french fries that reach the table will be seed-oil-free.
“We don’t see it as a fad — we think it’s the next frontier,” Barker said. “We give restaurants and chefs a way to stay ahead.”
For Stolon, staying ahead means finding the fastest way to get french fries from the field to restaurants. The company currently sells to restaurants in Charleston, Myrtle Beach, Columbia and Beaufort, but there are plans to expand to other destinations throughout the Carolinas.
A new partnership with Sysco could help make that growth a possibility. Selling through one of the world’s largest food distributors, though, has impacted the price, said Kline, the owner of The Grit Counter and Grace & Grit.
Kline, who worked with Barker at a Mount Pleasant pizzeria in the 1990s, began serving Stolon’s sweet potato fries a few years ago at The Grit Counter. Heightened food costs temporarily took them off the menu, though Kline and his head chef hope to bring them back if the price is right.
“It just fit our M.O,” Kline said. “They are a very tasty product.”
Dining and Cooking