Five Guys
Five Guys Cajun Fries Copycat Recipe
Skin-on potatoes, fried twice at two temperatures, tossed hot in Cajun seasoning. The oil is doing more of the flavou…
How to Make Five Guys Cajun Seasoning at Home
Cajun Seasoning: Closer to a Shrimp Boil Than to a Barbecue Rub
The best thing Five Guys sells, in a jar, for about a pound.
AI-generated illustration created for food.fast. It is not photographic evidence of a prepared batch.
Five Guys has the shortest menu of any chain on this site and the highest price per item, and the single best thing it sells costs almost nothing to make: the Cajun seasoning that goes on the fries.
It is not a barbecue rub and it is not what most British supermarkets sell as Cajun seasoning, which is usually a mild, cumin-heavy blend aimed at chicken. This is closer to a Louisiana shrimp boil mix - paprika-led, assertively salty, with celery salt underneath doing a savoury job that is difficult to place and impossible to replace.
Ninety seconds in a bowl. The jar will outlast most of what else is in your spice cupboard.
How this page shows its working
The method gives quantities, timings and observable cues rather than asking you to guess. The 4 cases in If it goes wrong explain likely causes and corrective action.
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Celery salt is the ingredient you cannot substitute
Celery salt is ground celery seed blended with salt, and celery seed tastes almost nothing like a stick of celery - it is bitter, grassy and intensely savoury, a bit like a cross between parsley and hops.
In this blend it is doing what MSG does in other savoury mixes: providing a background depth that makes everything else taste more of itself. Leave it out and the blend is paprika and salt with a bit of heat - perfectly nice, entirely forgettable.
It is in every Louisiana seasoning blend, in Old Bay, and in a Bloody Mary. A jar costs about a pound and a half and lasts years.
If you genuinely cannot get it, grind a teaspoon of celery seed with a teaspoon of salt. If you cannot get celery seed either, there is no substitute worth naming and the blend will be a different, lesser thing.
How to make it, step by step
Make it
-
Crush the dried herbs between your palms
Oregano and thyme, rubbed as they go in, which breaks the leaf pieces down and releases the oils.
About 1 min -
Whisk everything for thirty seconds
Until the colour is completely uniform with no visible white specks of salt against the paprika. Shaking a jar sorts by density rather than mixing.
About 1 min -
Jar it and date it
Best in the first three months, usable for six.
About 1 min
How to actually apply it to chips, which matters more than people think
Straight out of the fryer, into a bowl, seasoned, and tossed - not sprinkled on a plate.
The reason is fat. A hot chip has a thin film of oil on its surface, and the seasoning sticks to that film. Sprinkled from above onto a static plate, most of it lands on the plate and the top surfaces only. Tossed in a bowl within thirty seconds of coming out of the oil, every surface is coated.
That thirty-second window is real. Once the chips have cooled and the surface oil has been absorbed, seasoning stops adhering and slides off.
Roughly a teaspoon per portion, added in two goes with a toss between. It will look like too much and it is not - a good deal of it ends up in the bottom of the bowl.
Everything else this blend goes on
It was made for chips and it is one of the most generally useful things in a spice cupboard:
- Roast potatoes, tossed with the oil before roasting.
- Chicken wings, as a dry rub before baking or frying.
- Popcorn, while it is still warm and greasy.
- Prawns, which is what the blend's ancestors were for.
- Corn on the cob, with butter.
- Mixed into mayonnaise at a teaspoon per half cup, which makes an excellent chip dip in its own right.
- On a fried egg, which sounds odd and is excellent.
The blend by weight
| Ingredient | Spoons | Grams | % of blend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sweet paprika | 3 tbsp | 20 g | 29% |
| Fine salt | 1½ tbsp | 27 g | 39% |
| Celery salt | 1 tbsp | 15 g | 21% |
| Garlic powder | 2 tsp | 6 g | 9% |
| Onion powder | 2 tsp | 5 g | 7% |
| Cayenne | 1½ tsp | 3 g | 4% |
| Black pepper | 1½ tsp | 3 g | 4% |
| Oregano and thyme | 2 tsp | 1.5 g | 2% |
Ways to change it once you have made it once
Hotter
Double the cayenne to a tablespoon and add a teaspoon of chipotle powder.
Lower salt
Drop the fine salt to 2 tsp and use celery seed rather than celery salt. Season the food directly instead.
Blackening rub
Add a tablespoon of smoked paprika and a teaspoon of mustard powder. For fish and chicken cooked hard in a dry pan.
What went wrong, and how to fix it
Each entry names a likely cause as well as a correction, so the advice remains useful when equipment, ingredients or batch size differ.
It tastes flat
- Why it happened
- No celery salt.
- What to do
- There is no substitute that gets there. Buy the jar.
Too salty
- Why it happened
- Both salt and celery salt at full quantity.
- What to do
- Drop the fine salt to 1 tbsp and use celery seed plus a pinch of salt instead of celery salt.
The seasoning fell off the chips
- Why it happened
- Sprinkled on cold chips rather than tossed hot.
- What to do
- Into a bowl within thirty seconds of the fryer, seasoned and tossed.
It has faded to brown
- Why it happened
- Paprika degrading in light.
- What to do
- Dark jar, dark cupboard. It will still taste fine.
Questions people actually ask about this recipe
What makes Five Guys Cajun seasoning different?
Celery salt and a very high paprika-to-everything-else ratio. It is closer to a Louisiana boil seasoning than to the cumin-led blends sold as Cajun in the UK.
Can I use celery seed instead of celery salt?
Yes - a teaspoon of ground celery seed plus a teaspoon of salt replaces a tablespoon of celery salt.
How much do I use on a portion of chips?
About a teaspoon, tossed in a bowl within thirty seconds of the fryer.
Is it hot?
Moderately. A teaspoon and a half of cayenne in 70 g of blend gives a background warmth rather than a burn.
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