There’s Exactly One Trick To Making Perfectly Roasted Potatoes
It’s October. Hopefully your landlord has turned your heat on. Perhaps you’ve dug out your Dutch oven and your cast iron after a summer too hot to cook most things. Soon, the temperature outside will consistently drop, and you will be left to do one thing: make a perfect roast chicken (for which you only really need three ingredients), and make some roast potatoes to go along with that chicken.
Potatoes are a convenient vessel for whatever you want them to be, but they’re also curiously easy to fuck up if handled poorly. How many of us have suffered through gummy mashed potatoes, or an undercooked roasted potato, or a steak fry that tastes too much like a raw potato for our personal comfort? There’s one secret I’ve found to keep your potatoes from suffering this fate, and it’s remarkably simple: you have to shake the potatoes in their roasting vessel.
Let me explain.
Shaking your potatoes will make your parboiled babies look hideously ugly and roughened up, but it’s this roughening that allows for maximum crispiness after roasting — it maximizes the surface area on the potatoes when they go into the oven.
Here’s how we’re going to make crispy potatoes.
The first thing you’re going to do is peel your potatoes, and cut them into chunks…
