I’ve been asked so many times “how do you get your roast potatoes so crispy and light?”

There are zillions of recipes you can get hold of, all claiming to promise you crispy roasties. Some of them work, and some of them don’t. The recipe I am going to share with you all today is one which will work!!! If you don’t want to take a risk on Christmas Day to see if you are going to get super crispy roasties, have a little trial run this week.

First of all, you need to make sure you choose the correct potato. There are over 500 varieties of potatoes, all with different characteristics, flavours, textures and price!  I acknowledge that your location could be absolutely anywhere in the world, and potatoes have different names, so here are a few names of the type of potato you need to hunt down for the best results;

Cara, Celine, Desiree, King Edward, Majestic, Maris Piper, Dunbar Standard, Golden Wonder, Kerrs Pink, Pentland Dell, Stemster, Valor.

By far the most common and readily available in most supermarkets are the King Edwards and Maris Piper. If you can’t find any of these potatoes, look on the bag and see if they are suitable for ‘,mashing’, or if they say they are ‘fluffy’.

Some tips before you start;

•  To calculate how many potatoes you will need, I use roughly 2 medium sized (size of an average apple) potatoes per person.
• If you are doing a roast dinner, that is, roasting meat, I would boil the potatoes first, leave them to cool on a plate until the meat is cooked, then roast the potatoes once the meat is out of the oven. (the meat can have it’s ‘resting’ time whilst your potatoes are roasting)
• You need to have a really hot oven, as hot as you can get it.
• Cooking times will vary depending on what else you may have cooking in the oven. The fuller the oven, the longer it will take!

So here goes,

1. Peel the potatoes and cut into quarters or smaller. the smaller the potatoes, the higher crispiness sensation you will have in each piece!

2. Place in a saucepan with cold water and a pinch of salt, and bring to the boil.

3. Keep an eye on the potatoes once the water starts to boil. After approximately 10 minutes, you will notice the sides of the potatoes start to ‘flake’. When they look like the one in the photo, it’s time to take them off the heat and drain them. Using the lid, to keep the potatoes in the pan, tip all the water out.

4. Once drained, holding the pan with one hand and the lid covering the pan with the other hand, give the potatoes a good toss and shake. Your potatoes should look like this…. all flaky and fluffy.

5. Turn the potatoes out onto a plate and let the steam evaporate from them. The idea here is to dry the potatoes out a bit before roasting. If they are a bit wet, they won’t crisp up as well in the oven.

6. Whilst the potatoes are cooling, and once your meat is out of the oven resting, turn your oven up to as high a temperature as possible. Pour some oil into a roasting tray. There should be about 1cm deep of oil covering the tin. Vegetable oil works nicely.

Put the tray with the oil in the oven and let it heat up until it’s sizzling. You will know if it’s hot enough when you place your first potato in…if you don’t see a sizzle, heat the tray up for longer.

7. When the oil is really hot, place the potatoes in the tray, taking care not to splash any oil on you. Using a spoon, pour / spoon some of the oil all over the tops of the potatoes, and spread them out in your tray. Sprinkle some salt (optional), and let the crispiness begin!

When the potatoes begin to brown, turn them and wait until they look like this….

And there you have the crispiest roast potatoes!

I hope you enjoy making them as much as you will enjoy the crsipilishiness of them.

 

If you would like to see a selection of our Roast Dinner recipes, such as Roast Beef, chicken, Pork with crackling  please visit Lovefoodies here. 

Happy holidays everyone, and please feel free to add any comments below.

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