Maggie Beer (pictured) has shared her simple recipe to cook the perfect roast potatoes
Australian celebrity chef Maggie Beer has shared her surprisingly simple recipe for perfect roast potatoes using three ingredients and no herbs or extra fat.
The cookbook author uploaded a cooking video on social media showing exactly how she makes her spuds crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside.
All you’ll need are waxy potatoes such as the red-skinned désirée, salt and olive oil.
‘First, have good potatoes. A base waxy potato like désirée are very accessible but any potato that will roast will be fantastic,’ Maggie said from her Barossa kitchen.
To prepare her roasted potatoes, Maggie sliced the potatoes in half with skin on and then parboiled them in a pot of boiling salted water for 20 minutes – this will slash the roasting time in the oven and ensure the insides become really fluffy.
The cookbook author used just three ingredients to make the dish – potatoes, salt and olive oil
‘I’ve got Désirée – waxy potatoes. They are crispy, beautiful, amazing potatoes. I’ve left the skin on and I cook them for 20 minutes at a simmer in salted water,’ she said.
Once the potatoes were done, she drained them in a colander.
Next, Maggie gently half-squashed each potato with a wooden spatula and placed them into a large bowl.
‘What I’m going to do is squash these down, spreading them out. Keep some shape but only some, skins on and of course, you can peel them if you must,’ she said.
‘I guess if you peel them, it’ll be a little bit fluffier but the goodness in the skin, let alone the flavour in the skin are so worth it that there is no way I’m going to lose that.
‘They have to be cooked enough to be able to squash down like this.’
Once potatoes are parboiled, she drained in a colander before ‘squashing’ them
Maggie gently half-squashed each potato with a wooden spoon and placed them into a bowl
Maggie then seasoned the potatoes with two teaspoons of salt and a generous amount of olive oil, then toss to coat
Maggie then seasoned the potatoes with two teaspoons of salt and a generous amount of olive oil, then toss to coat.
‘I’m going to drizzle them liberally with olive oil… lots of olive oil to moisten the bits. Olive oil being the good fat but there’s nothing against butter.’
She placed the potatoes in a ‘very heavy based’ baking tray and roasted them for just 20 minutes at a very high temperature of 230 degrees.
‘Now that’s going to be another 20 minutes because I want all those jagged edges to become really crispy, and they’d be such a fight for them when they go on the table,’ Maggie said.
Once the potatoes are crispy and golden all over, Maggie removed the tray from the oven.
‘You can see how beautifully crispy they are,’ she said.
Source: Food Recipes and News
