Genius Recipes
The Crispiest Roasted Potatoes, Thanks to One Little Step
How Molly Yeh wins the Super Bowl.
Every week in Genius Recipes—often with your help!—Food52 Creative Director and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook.
There is this one little step to getting the finest, crispiest roasted potatoes. I have always refused to do it, and I was wrong.
Especially if we’re talking bitty home fry–style cubes, as opposed to the proud, chunky genre of British roasted potato that gets all sorts of tricks for crispification—shaking to scratch up their edges, dusting with semolina, or oven-frying in goose fat or beef tallow, depending on whose opinion is loudest at the moment. All are boiled first, but I thought that was largely a matter of girth—the need for the insides to soften before the outsides burned.
In my laze and stubbornness, when it came to bite-sized bits, I scoffed at this step: Why would I ever go to the trouble of boiling potatoes, then roasting them?
Well, in the very first episode of her Food Network show Girl Meets Farm, Molly Yeh told us exactly why this step matters—and now so will I.
For one thing, boiling in salty water seasons the potatoes all the way through in a way that a cloak of fat and salt on a raw potato can’t. “I hate an under-salted potato,” Molly told me. Maybe more importantly though, boiling brings some of the potatoes’ starches—or I should say: “a dehydrated layer of gelatinized starch”—to the surface, so they get even crispier in the oven.
After making her recipe and serving it to a lot of very happy people, I had to admit that getting some water boiling really isn’t the hassle that had loomed large in my head—and nothing is a hassle if it’s this good.
Once boiled, the potatoes look a little dry and rough around the edges (in other words ready to crisp). Then Molly has you do another thing that I would have probably said you shouldn’t, had I not trusted her and tried it myself.
You toss the cooked potato bits not in olive oil as usual, nor in the aforementioned higher smoke-point fats, but in a couple tablespoons of straight melted butter. I would have thought the milk solids would burn at 450°F, but because the butter absorbs into those shaggy-dog potatoes, none is left to pool in the pan and sputter and smoke.
With the potatoes now free to get as crispy and brown as you’d like in the oven, you invoke the last bit of Molly’s genius: whisking together a dressing that tastes much less humble and simple than it really is—just some jarred mayo, lots of regular paprika (nope, not smoked), a little sugar, and plain white vinegar, the kind that you can clean your coffee maker with. Maybe the fanciest ingredient is a minced shallot, the onion’s dapper little friend.
Molly wisely has you make double the dressing so you can dip other things in it at a Super Bowl party, or use it to dress a salad another day (maybe this time with eggs or tuna or another friend of mayo). Of course, you can halve the dressing if you prefer. But you’ll miss it when it’s gone.
You can serve the salad warm right away like Molly did on Girl Meets Farm and it will meld into a patatas bravas-like warm-crispy-saucy thing that will make people go a little unhinged. Or, if you want to be able to set it out at a party and stay suspended in creamy-crunchy harmony for longer, just let the potatoes cool before dressing. Either way, as Molly says, “This is really kind of just a bowl of salty enough fries with mayo that you can eat with a spoon.”
| Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper | |
| 2 | pounds red potatoes, cut into 1/2-inch cubes |
| 2 | tablespoons unsalted butter, melted |
| 1 | cup mayonnaise |
| 1/4 | cup white vinegar |
| 1 | tablespoon paprika |
| 2 | teaspoons sugar |
| 1 1/2 | small shallots, finely chopped |
| Chopped chives, for garnish |
| Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper | |
| 2 | pounds red potatoes, cut into 1/2-inch cubes |
| 2 | tablespoons unsalted butter, melted |
| 1 | cup mayonnaise |
| 1/4 | cup white vinegar |
| 1 | tablespoon paprika |
| 2 | teaspoons sugar |
| 1 1/2 | small shallots, finely chopped |
| Chopped chives, for garnish |
Got a genius recipe to share—from a classic cookbook, an online source, or anywhere, really? Please send it my way (and tell me what's so smart about it) at [email protected]—thank you to former Food52 editor and ceramicist to the stars Marian Bull for this one!
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Written by: Kristen Miglore
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54 Comments
Now why did I do this? Well, I find a lot of the time, the food bloggers here on Food52 are not very well informed on food science or chemistry. Ms. Miglore does not mention the NaHCO3 trick in her introduction, maybe because neither she nor the staff probably do not know that raising the pH of things like potatoes, dry beans, and a lot of vegetables when cooking in water breakdowns the pectin in the vegetable tissues that hold plants together. The second thing is the high Na+ titer in the cooking water accelerates ion exchange of sodium ions for calcium and magnesium ions in the pectin, analogous to what happens when one regenerates a water softener column with salt. Net, net, you get a lot more surface gelatinization of the potato starch this way.
This high pH treatment causes things like potatoes to develop a very grainy, rough surface texture, which is ideal for browning either in the oven or by frying. Try it sometime, with something like duck fat roasted potatoes, for example, which are prepared much the same way as in this recipe, but with duck fat in lieu of butter. Every time I make d.f.r.p., our family all but licks the platter clean.
But my pinch of NaHCO3 was not the reason I am panning this recipe. Not at all.
You see, I prepared this dish hours ahead of time and had a large room temperature bowl of wonderfully browned and tasty potato cubes (when warm, that is). A jar of the paprika mayonnaise prepared exactly as per the recipe was chilled in the refrigerator prior to combining with the room temperature roasted potatoes just before serving at our family Easter banquet.
The dish reminded me and some of the guests at our Easter dinner of cold French fries with dressing. And that Ladies and Gentlemen is why I would not make this again unless I can serve it hot or at least warm.
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