To his high school teachers, he’s Frank Kamish.
But to his YouTube subscribers, the Minneapolis junior is FHK.
And Kamish, 18 as of this April, is hoping a recent stunt to create what he bills as the world’s longest French fry will cement his status as YouTube’s “fry guy.”
He runs two YouTube channels: one dedicated to challenge-style videos like this one, and another full of quick-hit reviews of French fries from restaurants around the country. His main FHK channel sits at about 1,900 subscribers as of now, with eight full-length videos.
The giant fry Kamish made for the video was 12 feet long and, to be fair, perhaps closer to a potato dumpling log or a gnocchi loaf. The creation was made from a dough of instant mashed potato, flour and water — a recipe he landed on after chatting with chef Tommy Begnaud of Mr. Paul’s Supper Club in Edina — and packed into a gutter he bought from a hardware store.
Kamish par-cooked the fry in boiling water and then, instead of deep-frying it, slathered butter and oil on the exterior and blowtorched it, a process he said was largely due to safety concerns and logistical challenges.
Was it delicious? Not really, Kamish admitted. But the freedom to play around is part of why he hopes to hit it big on YouTube, he said.
“In this early stage, it’s just a big experiment on what I’m going to do,” he said, over a basket of crinkle fries at Saint Dinette, in Lowertown. (His rating: 8.2 out of 10; well-salted, but he prefers straight-cut fries with a deeper golden-brown crust, as opposed to the fluffier kind here.)
“What is my style, is the biggest thing right now.”
One thing is for sure: It involves fries.
A couple years ago, Kamish’s friend moved to Colorado and met YouTuber Matthew Beem, who has 5.5 million subscribers, and connected Kamish with him.
Early in Beem’s own YouTube career, to establish himself with a splash, he created a custom car to surprise Jimmy Donaldson, a.k.a. MrBeast, the platform’s biggest individual creator.
The FHK version of the gambit — building Beem a giant Coca-Cola soda fountain and surprise-delivering it, in summer 2022 — sits at 25,000 views as of April 2024.
At a YouTube creators’ conference about a year ago, Beem and Kamish ran into each other again. The rising star remembered the high schooler’s penchant for French fries, and issued him a challenge: Make a giant fry.
Kamish flew to Denver to construct the fry there, so as to involve Beem in the result.
“This is actually the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen in my entire life,” Beem said in the video.
The world’s reigning largest fry — also technically a “molded potato chip,” per the experts at Guinness World Records, who certified it — was created in 2018 in India and clocked in at about 10.3 feet long. Kamish didn’t involve Guinness in his attempt; earning the certificate generally entails arduous paperwork and monthslong bureaucratic delays.
Kamish isn’t making money from YouTube right now; that’s certainly the goal, said his father, Paul Kamish, a caricaturist and fine art business owner, but he said the high schooler is learning valuable lessons in camera presence, video and sound editing and building a brand.
“The biggest thing that I need to implement is consistency,” Frank Kamish said. “That’s the only way I’m going to get to my milestone of being one of the biggest entertainers in the world.”
You can follow Frank Kamish at youtube.com/@ItsFHK.
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