Try this recipe for making crispy-creamy roast potatoes
Photograph and video: J. Kenji López-Alt
A couple of weeks ago, I watched Food Lab chef Kenji Lopez-Alt’s video recipe for crispy roast potatoes that are crunchy on the outside and creamy on the inside.
In the video, Lopez-Alt did a couple of things I hadn’t thought of before. First, he parboiled the potatoes in water with 1 ounce of salt and 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda. Then, he explained that the alkaline water corrodes the surface of the potato, which “creates tons of starchy slurry for added surface area and crunch.”
He also shook the boiled potatoes in a bowl to soften the outside of the potatoes, giving them the look of mashed potatoes. That way, when you roast them in the oven with a lot of oil, the outsides get super crispy.
The first time I tried the recipe I quartered the potatoes. They were tasty but not as crunchy as I’d hoped. So this time I cut each potato into eight pieces and the results were wonderful.
I peeled a 3-lb bag of organic yellow potatoes from Trader Joe’s.
While the potatoes were boiling I made the garlic-rosemary oil. After years of trying different ways to peel and crush garlic, this is my preferred set-up. First, I put the unpeeled cloves into the silicone rubber tube and rolled it on the table to quickly remove the skin. Then I placed the cloves under the rocking garlic crusher.
Here’s the garlic after crushing.
I heated garlic and rosemary in olive oil until the garlic started to turn golden. Unfortunately, I didn’t have fresh rosemary, so I used dried rosemary (note to self: buy a rosemary plant at Trader Joe’s).
After the potatoes boiled for 15 minutes, I poured out the water and let them steam for about five minutes. Then I shook them in the bowl until they got mushy on the outside.
I poured the oil through a strainer into the potatoes. I saved the bits to put on the potatoes after they were done roasting.
After gently mixing the potatoes and the oil, I spread them out in a roasting pan and put them in an oven preheated to 450° F. After 10 minutes I turned over the potato pieces and roasted them for another 10 minutes or so.
Done! And delicious!
Thanks for reading! The Magnet is written by Mark Frauenfelder and edited by Carla Sinclair.
