Roasted potatoes recipe | Jamie Oliver recipes (2024)

FAQs

Roasted potatoes recipe | Jamie Oliver recipes? ›

Jamie's top tip for the ultimate roasties? Gently squash each potato with a masher to slightly flatten them – this expands their surface area and creates mega crunchy edges. You're welcome. Potatoes flavoured with lemon, garlic and sage are grilled until beautifully bar-marked, then roasted until lightly golden.

Jamie's top tip for the ultimate roasties? Gently squash each potato with a masher to slightly flatten them – this expands their surface area and creates mega crunchy edges. You're welcome. Potatoes flavoured with lemon, garlic and sage are grilled until beautifully bar-marked, then roasted until lightly golden.

In a video online, Gordon explained: “For crispy roast potatoes, you can depend on them, my tip is to parboil them, leave them to steam dry, then sprinkle them with semolina or flour, and then give them a good roughing up.”

Soaking potatoes in water helps remove excess starch. Excess starch can inhibit the potatoes from cooking evenly as well as creating a gummy or sticky texture on the outside of your potatoes. Cold water is used because hot water would react with the starch activating it, making it harder to separate from the potatoes.

Parboil for perfection

Boiling your potatoes for a little bit before roasting helps make sure that you get that beautiful crisp crust on the outside. If you don't parboil your spuds, the outside skin will remain quite tough, meaning that whatever fat you use will not be able to get inside the cracks.

Neutral, low-cost oil such as vegetable oil, canola oil, safflower oil, peanut oil, corn oil, coconut oil, avocado oil, etc., work well for roasting. These oils have a high smoke point, allowing the potatoes to get very hot to achieve maximum crispiness.

CRISPY SPUDS

To get really crispy roast potatoes, make sure the fat or oil is really hot before you add the potatoes.

Parboiling: This involves partially cooking the potatoes in boiling water before finishing them in the oven, on the grill, or in a fryer.

The Best: Yukon Gold Potatoes

The Yukon Gold potato — which is also one of our favorites for mashing — is an obvious choice for roasting. Their skin is thin, so they cook through fairly quickly, and they're just waxy enough to hold their shape.

What happens if you don't soak potatoes? ›

The main reasons to cut the potatoes and pre-soak in water are: To allow the excess starches and sugars to be removed from the outer surface of the fry strips AND to keep the potatoes from browning prematurely from exposure to air. Covering in water helps the potato from turning a dark color.

Some people suggest that you leave your boiled spuds to dry overnight before you roast. This is because the best crunch is the result of the driest potato hitting the hot fat.

(Note: parchment paper is better to prevent sticking and aluminum foil yields crispier results but it does need to be lightly greased and may still stick.) Roast potatoes for 30-40 minutes, depending on the size of larger potato pieces.

We tasted the potatoes and agreed that post-salting is better than pre-salting. Salting before or after clearly makes a difference. The outside of the post-salted potatoes is more crispy and has a nice bite to it, whereas the outside of the pre-salted potatoes is tough and leathery.

Keep potatoes crisp in a warm oven if you're serving them in 1-2 hours. If there is a slight wait before everyone eats, don't cover the crispy potatoes—this traps steam which will make the potatoes soggy. Just keep them in the oven, but turn the temperature to the lowest setting.

To have a truly marvellous roast potato, one must simply let the potato dry completely after parboiling, before roasting in extremely hot fat.

Remove them from the original cooking container, pat them dry and let rest on a cooling rack or cookie sheet. Something that will allow air flow and not allow the potatoes to be stacked on each other. Put them on a rack, such as you might use for cookies or bread after it's baked. Put the rack over a sheet pan.

Should vegetables be on the top or bottom of pot roast? I recommend adding the vegetables (carrots and potatoes) to the top and sides of your pot roast and only do so after the roast has cooked for the first 1 1/2 hours so that they do not get too mushy.

Parboil the potatoes

Add the potatoes to a large pot of salted water and boil for about 5 minutes. You can also add 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda to the salted water for an extra crispy effect. Be careful not to overcook the potatoes; they should be tender — not soft.