Genius Recipes
Ultra-Crispy Roast Potatoes From a Secret Cooking Club in Indonesia
Plus, 20 beginner recipes I’m still hunting for our next Genius cookbook.
Every week in Genius Recipes—often with your help!—Food52 Founding Editor and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook.
Crispy potatoes steal attention wherever they go, and deservedly so. The contrast of hot, salty crunch to soft, steamy belly is as Pavlovian as it gets. No wonder we’ve been pre-heating our pans and fiddling with pH and chasing the singular best technique all this time.
But once you’ve got your crisping technique down—and, oh, does this recipe have it down—there’s an even more impactful frontier to cross: flavor. What if they could taste the way they crunch? What if we could match the roasted potato’s position on the zero-to-French fry scale of craveability with umami, tang, and zing?
When Lara Lee was travelling through Indonesia writing her gorgeous new cookbook Coconut & Sambal, researching the recipes of both her own family and of home cooks and chefs all over Indonesia, she encountered such a potato, in the home of a member of a secret cooking club in Surabaya, the capital city of the province of East Java.
“It really started as this secret society of women—which I loved—and that generous hospitality that I got all over Indonesia where everyone wants to teach you their family recipes,” Lara told me in the video above.
“The original dish is a dish called sambal goreng kentang, which is essentially a fried potato dish," she continued. "So the potatoes are chopped, and then fried in a wok in oil, and then stirred through with a really aromatic spice paste of lots of aromatics like ginger, like garlic, and then quite often stirred together with things like liver or gizzards…it was really, really delicious.”
Back home in London, Lara wanted to keep the flavors and crunch of sambal goreng kentang, and make it easy to recreate in home kitchens outside of Indonesia. She experimented with roasting techniques to mimic the crunch of a good fry, settling on this genius strategy: Swiftly simmer potatoes in salty water, drain, then toss them back in the pot for a couple minutes to steam-dry. Shake about to rough up the edges, then roast them hard in hot, garlicky oil. Finish with a quick, chunky stir-fry of ginger, garlic, and scallions, and a big dousing of soy sauce and rice vinegar.
When I first saw this recipe, I had to know if the crisp would hold up through dinner against such a generous, flavorful soak and—thanks to Lara’s smart technique—it does. Like a good Buffalo wing, the dressing seeps in without softening too quickly, while the shreds of chewy ginger and sweet twists of green onion give more textures for your fork to chase.
Lara likes to serve this with roasted or grilled meats, and I’ve had it in many week-brightening dinners with my husband’s famous fried eggs. In Indonesia, sambal goreng kentang is typically served with rice and sambal on the side—you also might want to put her potatoes in the center of the plate, since they will inevitably steal the show.
For close to a decade, whenever you’ve stumbled on a recipe that shocked you or taught you something memorable—much like Lara’s potatoes will, from here on out, have me reaching for new sauces my crispy potatoes can drink up—you’ve been generous enough to send them my way.
You’ve fueled the Genius column and cookbooks, which is why I’m asking for your help once again. I’m knee-deep in the next cookbook—for beginners!—and there are a good handful of recipes I’m still on the lookout for.
If any on this list jump to mind—from a cookbook, a blog, an Instagram post, wherever—please share them in the comments below or at [email protected]. As always, I’ll thank you by name in the book for the tips that make it in. And even better, we’ll all get to trade tips and stories in the comments like last time.
1) Overnight oats or muesli
2) Other quick workday breakfasts (bonus if they’re vegan or vegetarian)
3) Huevos rancheros, migas, or other new life for stale tortillas
4) Dutch baby or other puffy pancakes
5) Make-ahead strata or other low-stress breakfasts for a crowd
6) A big-batch cocktail
7) Dinners faster than ordering takeout (that aren’t noodle-based)
8) Set-and-forget soups/stews/etc. that are still ready in an hour or two (not eight)
9) Dal
10) The best dinners with canned fish
11) A stir-fry (preferably vegetarian)
12) Last-minute sauces and schmears
13) A sheet pan dinner that works every time (and is truly one-pan, and doesn’t sneak in extra washings of said pan)
14) A genius garlic bread (I love this one but I usually want the garlicky part toasted, too)
15) Side dishes only slightly more elaborate than buttering a bag of frozen peas
16) Homemade brownies as simple as the boxed kind
17) Galette
18) The laziest desserts that aren’t just opening a bag of Tate’s
19) Any other recipes that made a big impact on you when you were first starting to cook
20) Any other recipes you make constantly, and never want to stop making
From our new podcast network, The Genius Recipe Tapes is lifelong Genius hunter Kristen Miglore’s 10-year-strong column in audio form, featuring all the uncut gems from the weekly column and video series. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss out.
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Written by: Kristen Miglore
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89 Comments
my wife i ate big fans of deb perelman of smitten kitchen’s method for making an inauthentic but still awesome version of huevos rancheros. so much so that the word “huevo” is now a shorthand in our house for this recipe/technique. it doesn’t always work perfectly it even when you mess up your egg, it’s still always delicious! it also stands up to whatever toppings you have on hand. e like it with the leftover black beans that are often sitting in our fridge, chopped scallions, avocado, hot sauce, cilantro, and maybe a little yogurt or sour cream.
https://smittenkitchen.com/2008/07/huevos-rancheros/
Okay, I have so so many ideas but I’ll start with this one because it’s such a no-brainer and has been in our rotation all pandemic long. i’m talking about SHEET PAN GNOCCHI. this is the best because it’s truly so flexible — you can make it vegetarian or vegan, you can use store-bought, $1.99 gnocchi, make your own, or even cauliflower gnocchi — it all works and it’s all delicious.
just throw the gnocchi in a sheet pan with some rough-chopped (i actually like to use narrow-ish wedges) red onion and bell pepper, halved cherry tomatoes (whole if they are even smaller), smashed garlic, salt, freshly-ground black pepper (or crushed red pepper flakes if that’s more your thing, as it is ours). and maybe a quarter cup of olive oil, maybe less. smash a few garlic cloves and throw them in there. we like to break up some veggie sausage by hand and put that in, too, but you can also apparently do the same with actual pork sausage. add some dried oregano TOSS, TOSS, TOSS. roast at 425° for about 30 minutes, tossing once. YUM. crumble some feta cheese on top when you serve, if you feel like it, but delicious without, too! honestly the easiest sheet pan dinner that does not require you to fussily add different ingredients at different times, and is so so satisfying.
Barbara Kafka's microwave-made spicy polenta (from Microwave Gourmet)
Kafka's orange cumin roasted mushrooms (from Roasting)
Paul Prudhomme's blackening seasoning for chicken or fish takes no time at all to get the main course on the table.
Dorie Greenspan's salmon en papiote (from Around My French Table)
Peter Reinhart's pancake recipe is so easy and so good that I know it by heart (from Crust and Crumb).
Alice Medrich's Queen of Sheba is so easy for so little effort.
My local Afghan restaurant just puts a little rose water and crushed cardamom on vanilla ice cream and it's divine.
Deborah Madison's stewed fennel and tomatoes
Cobb salad, coleslaw, shakshuka, and aloo gobi were dishes I made over and over while a beginning cook.
I’ve been making tuna muffins (basically a tuna melt) since I first started cooking for myself. Mix up a can of tuna, some diced carrots and celery, and enough mayo to make it wet. Spread it on English muffins and bake at 350 for a few minutes. Sprinkle cheddar cheese on top and put under the broiler until bubbly. It’s still a go-to meal for when I don’t want to cook a full dinner but don’t feel like take-out either. There are no set measurements, and if I mix up too much tuna, I put the rest in the refrigerator to eat the next day.
Another recipe I love is cabbage and egg stir-fry. After being tossed in the pan, the shredded cabbage caramelizes and becomes deliciously sweet and bits of egg add protein and a contrast in texture. Link: http://smithsonianapa.org/picklesandtea/eggy-stir-fried-cabbage/
(the dish can be easily made vegan too!)
And Sohla El-Waylly just did a great video about strata!
I really enjoy the Genius Recipes series. I think you are great Kristen and the recipes are awesome. Quite a few of them have become staples in my rotation.
A neat little sandwich I like to have is peas with olive oil, ginger and mint. I came across it on this blog here: https://whatshouldieatforbreakfasttoday.com/pea-sandwiches-with-ginger-and-ricotta/ but it's all over the internet. Really simple but full of flavors that I wouldn't think of pairing. The recipe calls for ricotta but I usually just use cottage cheese and am perfectly satisfied.
Can't wait to see what you have in store for us.
Seema Saigol’s Daal Recipe
If making yellow channa daal you should soak it for two hours. If not it will take longer to cook which is fine too.
Ingredients:
1 cup dried daal (any dried lentils such as yellow or red lentils)
4 cups water
2 tbls oil
2 tsp zeera (cumin) seeds
1/4 tsp hing (asafoetida) (optional)
1/2 tsp haldi (turmeric)
1/2 tsp red chile powder (pure spicy chili, not the spice blend that has cumin and other things) (depending on taste)
1 to 2 tsp salt (depending on taste)
2 tsp crushed coriander seeds (or powder)
2 tomatoes, chopped
1 large onion, chopped
4-5 garlic cloves, chopped
About 2 tbls ginger julienned or chopped
1/2 tsp Garam masala for the end (optional)
Rinse out the dried daal in 2-3 changes of water.
Add daal to a pan with 4 cups water. Bring to a boil and let it simmer till it softens. The red daal takes the least time to soften (about 20 mins). Turn off heat and leave pan there.
For the tardka (tempering of spices), heat 2 tbls oil in another pan. Add hing (optional), zeera, haldi, coriander and red chillie. Swirl around for 30 seconds till you can smell the aroma. Then add the onions, garlic, ginger and tomatoes and salt and let cook till the onions soften and you can see the oil separating from the vegetables. Then add the boiled lentils (with their water) to this. Let it gently simmer with lid on for about ten mins. If your daal is too watery you can keep lid off!
Now taste the daal. It might need more salt and you can add lemon (I usually do in daal).
Add garam masala. If you feel it needs more spices you can add a chilli tarka.
For chili tarka just heat up a tbls of oil or ghee in a small pan and add chillies (can also add ginger/garlic and more cumin seeds if you need it) to it. Let it cook for a few seconds. It can burn easily so need to watch it! Now add this tarka to the hot daal.
Check for salt!
Spray a nonstick skillet, or melt a bit of butter/oil. Lay a tortilla flat on the pan (can be straight from frozen). Sprinkle a light layer of any cheese on the full circle. Add your fillings to half the tortilla*. Sprinkle a bit more cheese on top of fillings to help stick. Once the base layer of cheese is melted and bottom of tortilla is brown and crispy, it’s ready to fold over. Press down, slice and enjoy! The recipe is from the Instagram @diyascooking in the quesadillas+ highlight!
Fillings: I like to do veg like bell peppers, spinach, black beans cooked in cumin, paprika, chile powder; or lentils mixed with same spices and tomato paste; or sautéed spinach or kale with goat cheese... endless options. I’ll usually cook the veggies first in same skillet, then wipe it down and cook tortilla).
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