Tips & Tricks | Crispy Potatoes
- savanzino
- Mar 31, 2016
- 3 min read
I am a fan of carbs. Which leads me to this post of discovering how to create the crispiest oven roasted potatoes. I feel like I have always been able to cook potatoes thoroughly but never reach the point of crispiness that I am desiring. I solved that dilemma and will forever more cook my potatoes this way. But before I tell you how, I am going to tell you about the two techniques I used to get to this discovery.
The Crispy Potato Duel
I wanted to test out the two most commonly found recipes for "crispy oven potatoes" that I could find on Pinterest. The most common techniques I found were 1) to either to parboil them and then roast them at a high temperature or to 2) soak them in water first and then put them in to the oven without being pre-cooked. My initial thoughts were pre-boiling them would speed up the cooking process and therefore allow them to crisp up quickly.
Side note: I used a bag of these "Blushing Belle" potatoes, I would definitely recommend them and I'll use them again!
To start I diced up all the potatoes so they were an even size and would cook quickly. Half of them then went into a pot of water to boil for 15 minutes, the other half soaked in cold water for an hour.
Once the soaked potatoes have done their job, make sure to dry them off in a towel prior to baking them. I recommend a dish towel or something that will not give off any fuzz. No one wants to eat fuzz for dinner. Once they were dry I mixed them with olive oil, garlic salt and pepper.
While the one batch was boiling, I put the soaked potatoes into the oven to start cooking. Since the boiling potatoes will have a head start in cooking, I put the non-boiled, but soaked, potatoes in ahead of time to start cooking in hopes they would finish cooking at the same time.
Once the boiling potatoes were partially cooked but not fully cooked, I drained them and put them in a bowl with some olive oil, garlic salt and pepper. I took the soaked potatoes out of the oven and added the boiled potatoes to the other half of the pan. Now comes the comparison! I even made a fancy little divider so you can see the difference. Ok, so it is just folded aluminum foil, but hey...it is something.
As you can see above, the soaked potatoes potatoes have been cooking and already have some crisp on them. After this I put the pan of both potatoes back in the oven for 20 more minutes.
From this picture it is easy to see the winner for making crispy potatoes. Soaking them prior to baking is what resulted in the crispiest potatoes. Which is interesting because they were both submerged into water, one into cold water and the other into boiling. But the boiled ones did not provide nearly the same amount of crisp.
From here on out I will be soaking my potatoes for at least an hour before putting in the oven!
So there you have it, the mystery is solved. The way to make crispy oven roasted potatoes is to pre-soak them.
Crispily (is that a word?) in the midst,
Samantha
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