French Fries
Food · FoodDishVegetable1★Potato cut and deep-fried, and impossible to stop once the first one goes down. Holds SAN loss back for a time.
French Fries is an early cooked dish: 17th of 20 by hunger restored, so treat it as a stepping stone, at 35 against the 738 of Special Cake.
No recipe takes it as an ingredient. Whatever you build is the finished article, so there is no reason to hoard spares.
Details
It weighs almost nothing and stacks to 9,999, so there is no reason not to carry a full stack.
French Fries Crafting Recipe
Potato×2
High Quality Pal OilCrafting it takes 3 materials across 2 types, and the bottleneck is almost always the 2× requirement — line that up first and the rest follows.
Where to Find French Fries
French Fries is not something you find lying around — you craft it, and the recipe is below.
Using French Fries Well
The "holds SAN loss back for a time" line has numbers behind it. The game's food-effect table gives this dish a single buff — SAN resistance +25, running for 600 seconds — and that is entirely separate from the 10 sanity it hands back the moment you eat it. Ten minutes is the standard cooked-food window, so the practical move is to eat before a long stretch of caving, night travel or cold-region work rather than after your sanity has already slid. For scale on that field: the three suspicious juices sit at -25,000 to -100,000 on it, which is what "resistance switched off" looks like, and the best cooked dishes reach +50.
Do not treat it as a meal. At restoreFood 35 it is the thinnest of the SAN dishes by a wide margin — Mozzarina Hamburger is 162 off the same tier of buff, Mushroom Quiche is 184 — so eating fries to fill a hunger bar burns two potatoes for almost nothing. Cook them for the buff, carry something heavier for the hunger, and never load them into a feed box where Pals will eat through the stack as ordinary rations.
The recipe goes on the Cooking Pot, the level 17 technology, and it needs a Pal with Kindling assigned or the order sits in the queue untouched. The same recipe is accepted further up the line by the Electric Kitchen at 41 and the Large-Scale Stone Oven at 49, and by the Ancient Kitchen at 70, so nothing about the dish expires as the base grows — the later cookers just work through a backlog faster.
Twelve dishes carry a SAN-resist value and every one of them runs the same 600-second window, so duration is never what separates them — only the number is. The ceiling is +50, held by Fried Kelpsea, Spring Rolls and Mushroom Quiche. French Fries shares the +25 tier with Pancake, Fried Chikipi and Mozzarina Hamburger, and the floor is +20 on Bolognese Sauce, Grilled Lamball and Stewed Galeclaw. What makes this the one worth keeping stocked early is that it is the only member of the +25 tier that needs neither Flour nor a butchered Pal — no Mill, no ranch, no meat. Everything above it in the table wants Flour.
For a standing supply, the potatoes are the easy half and the oil is the limiter. A Potato Plantation turns over in 5.8 minutes for 10 Potato a harvest at 51,000 work, which is five servings per cycle and effectively unlimited once the plot is planted and watered. The single High Quality Pal Oil per batch cannot be farmed, so however much High Quality Pal Oil you have on hand is the real batch size — bank it before you queue a long cook rather than discovering the shortfall mid-order.
Alternatives and Upgrades
Step up from here and you get Baked Potato at 40 hunger restored; step down and it is Bread at 27. Weigh the jump against what the next tier costs you before committing the resources.
Other cooked dishs at a similar tier, for when you want to weigh this against the rest of its class:
