Perfect Roast Potatoes In Six Easy Steps
Perfect roast potatoes, soft one the inside with a crispy crunchy skin, are easy to make when you follow these simple steps.
Use Good Quality Potatoes
Quality ingredients leads to quality food. Red potatoes are ideal for roasting, typically they have a firm yet smooth texture.
Peel And Cut Into Chunks
Peel your potatoes and cut them into chunks and rinse. Smaller chunks means more crispy outsides!
Boil And Shake
Put potatoes in a pan of boiling water and simmer for at least 5 minutes. To save time it makes sense to put the pan of water on the heat before you start to peel the potatoes.
The perfect roast potato has a soft inside, this step is important to achieving this.
Missing out this step leads to roast potatoes which are crispy on the outside but hard on inside. Not good.
Drain And Allow Steam To Escape
Drain your potatoes (rather than pour water down drain why not save in a jug to use for making gravy or to pour on your compost heap?)
Leave for a few minutes for steam to escape, this will reduce the amount of water left in potatoes which will help them roast.
Leave the empty pan you boiled potatoes in with it’s lid off, so steam escapes and the pan dries.
Put some olive oil or butter or lard or goose fat in a roasting tray and put this in a pre-heated oven to melt. If you are roasting some meat just use the oven at whatever temperature it is. If you’re just roasting potatoes pre-heat your oven to 400F/200C/gas mark 6.
If you are roasting some meat, just turn up the heat when the meat is done.
Shake Shake Shake
Return potatoes to the pan they were boiled in (both potatoes and pan should now be dry or at least dryish) put the lid on pan and holding the lid firmly in place shake the pan as hard as you can for a minute or two.
This step is crucial and makes all the difference. Shaking will bash up the surface of the potatoes which will help to form super crispy crunchy skins when roasting.
Roast
Tip potatoes into roasting tray and spread out evenly, ideally there will be a single layer.
Turn each potato around so they’re every side is coated in fat.
Sprinkle with salt and roast for about an hour.
About 1/2 way through cooking take the tray out turn the each potatoe upside down and, since many ovens don’t cook completely evenly, turn the tray 180º to swap back and front.
Roasted
And Ready To Serve
Most people don’t serve roast potatoes on their own, but as part of a meal typically with roast meat. Cooking a roast meal is not particularly complicated, not really any more complicated than cooking roast potatoes on their own.
If there is an issue it is timing, getting all the different parts ready at the same time. It makes sense to be able to cook each part of the meal individually and once you’re confident with this then work on the timing so you can get each part ready for the table at the same time.
Two things work in a cooks favor.
Firstly meat will taste better if taken out of the oven and left to rest for 15 – 30 minutes before eating (depending on size of roast meat).
Secondly food takes longer to cool than many people realise, so they worry unnecessarily. Anyway who wants to put burning hot food in their mouths?
And once you’ve roasted potatoes why not also roast other vegetables such as
- carrots
- parsnips
- onions
and experiment with adding different herbs and/or spices.