Starch Madness 2025 Bracket

Readers, we need you to come with us, because we’re going back to the future. Sorry! We meant to say, Back to the fritter! That’s right, it’s year six of your favorite food-focused death-match—a competition worthy of Van Damme himself, and this year all of the contenders are FRIED.

Starch Madness started five years ago as a response to the pandemic, a time when many of us were stuck at home and seeking something fun to do when a lot of the normal fun things—like the major sporting event that inspired this bracket—were cancelled. We all enjoyed it so much that we kept it going in the years that followed, celebrating starchy mainstays such as pasta, potatoes, rice, and sandwiches. 

This year, fried just feels right. We’re fried. We bet many of you are too. And we’re dealing with that feeling the way we know how, by submerging ourselves in the trappings of a more optimistic era. It was a time when greasy mall food reigned. When video games may have looked worse but were more fun to play. When we faced the world’s problems with the kind of confidence only possible with teased hair and giant shoulder pads. When Rocky could turn the entire Soviet Union against their own Drago with nothing more than his honest-to-goodness, Philly-bred grit. Remember those days?

You know how this goes: We have 64 recipes from around the world, all starchy, all fried. You will vote, and one will come out on top. Will the winner really be the “best” in the world? Of course not! Do any of us still believe the will of the voting majority always leads to the best of all possible results? No, Starch Madness is a popularity contest that reflects the biases of our audience.

Want to change that? Want to tip the scales in favor of an underdog and against an obvious but undeserving top seed? Well then, you gotta vote. It may be just one lone vote in a sea of thousands, and your favorites may get knocked out along the way. That’s life. If you want any say in which dish gets crowned the Winner, then you know what you have to do: Roll up your white blazer sleeves and vote for the better of your remaining choices. Otherwise, it’s already over, and French Fries will be taking its second victory lap.

So step on up. Insert a coin. Press start. The game begins now.

How to Vote

Keep an eye both here and on our Instagram page for voting announcements. The competition begins on Monday, 3/17, with voting happening on our Instagram stories (@seriouseats). Every day of voting, the newest pairs of match-ups will debut at 10 a.m. ET, at which point you’ll have 23 hours to vote. We’ll take one hour to tally the votes, then release the next round.

So print and fill out a bracket, post a picture of it on Instagram and tag us. Take your debates to group chats and our comments sections, plot out your best attempts to skew the results, and make sure to have fun.

How We Choose the Recipes

There were two criteria for a recipe to be included in this bracket. First, it had to be starchy. That might mean the main ingredient itself is starchy (like a fried potato), or it could mean a starchy batter or coating on some other food (like fried chicken).

Second, it had to be fried. How did we define fried? This was our incredibly well-thought-out and utterly unimpeachable answer: Any food that is cooked in a decent-to-considerable amount of oil—enough to cause visible displacement of the oil when the food is lowered into it, and in which the primary mode of heat transfer is convection through the oil and not conduction from the pan. This means that shallow-frying is allowed in the competition but sautéing and stir-frying are not.

With that decided, we turned to our existing catalog of recipes, dusted off some older-but-stronger contenders, drafted a list of fried recipes we somehow didn’t already have, and created new contenders from there.

How the Bracket Works

We model our tournament after a traditional sport’s bracket. Once we’ve got the 64 qualifiers, we divide them into four regions. Each region contains 16 notable fried foods, seeded 1 through 16. That means there are four number-one seeds, four number-two seeds, and so on and so forth.

As for the seeding, we slotted a bunch of heavy-hitters against each other and staggered underdogs throughout with the aim of creating suspense; our #1 seeds are a combination of some of our longest-standing top-performing fried recipes on Serious Eats and ones we suspect will go far based on overall popularity in the United States.

Let’s be clear: A voting bracket is in its very nature a popularity contest. Winners are not necessarily the best, they’re just the most popular among those voting. This means that a lot of very deserving but lesser known fried foods—in particular some international ones—will have a disadvantage against things like, you know, french fries. Which we love! But also, can we do something new this year?

Every round of voting will see the competition cut in half, over and over, until just one extra-crispy victor remains.