Kenji’s Secrets for the Crispiest Roast Potatoes | NYT Cooking

so I'm going to try some, oh wow, that's crunchy. I don't know how well you can hear it, but it's pretty crunchy. Hey, I'm Kenji Lopez alt and today we're making my extra crispy Parmesan Crusted Roasted Potatoes that I spent. I lived in the north of England for a few months now. You know, every Sunday they have the Sunday

roast

, which is usually a sort of Yorkshire pudding of overcooked

roast

beef and very crispy

potatoes

. You know, the way they're usually made there is you boil them first. until they're a little soft and then you stir them roughly so that the outside is covered with this kind of starchy slurry like, you know, something like mashed

potatoes

and then when you roast them, that slurry adds a lot of surface area to what it makes them crispier, so this recipe uses that technique, but I try to maximize the amount of extra surface area that you add to the potatoes and you end up with this kind of crispy skin on the outside, so I have a couple of pounds of rusty potatoes, this works too by the way, you know, like a Yukon Gold potato, you don't want something super creamy like a red like a waxy red potato won't work as well it won't get very crispy, eh, but anything from Yukon Gold to rusty, a Starcher potato will work here.

I'm going to cut them into relatively large pieces. I've seen recipes similar to this made with even larger pieces of potato, so you could take, say, half a potato if you want, it comes out really well, it's got a sort of soft baked potato interior with a very nice crispy crust, so potato cells, you know, look like these kind of little rigid balloons. All those little balloons are held together with this carbohydrate glue called pectin, so when you cook vegetables, a lot of the softening that occurs is the breakdown of that pectin and these cells coming loose.

The idea here is that we want the outside of the potatoes. break down a little bit so that the cells can then combine with the butter and parmesan that we're going to add and make this kind of starchy slurry. The breakdown of pectin varies depending on the pH level, so the more alkaline the water you are

cooking

. That is, the higher the pH of the water, the more pectin will be broken down. In this case, we are measuring the water because we are adding a specific amount of baking soda and salt, that baking soda will increase the pH. of the liquid, so the outside of the potatoes will cook a little faster and break down faster and that's really the key to the recipe here, a lot of extra surface area, a lot of extra crunch now. to give it flavor here I'm going to take a cheesecloth bag.

I know the recipe calls for cheesecloth, but I don't think, I don't remember the last time I had cheesecloth in my kitchen at home and usually when the thing is called cheesecloth. I just throw it all in there and then pick it all up at the end. It doesn't have to be black pepper, garlic, rosemary and bay leaves. You know you can choose your own adventure. Cool weather would work. alright, you can do shallots instead of garlic, basically any kind of flavoring you think you'd like with potatoes. We will wait for it to boil, reduce it to a simmer and cook for about 10 minutes or so. um and then we'll be ready to move on to the next step uh in the meantime I'm going to pick some of this rosemary.

I don't think this is necessary in the recipe, but I'm going to choose a little extra rosemary so we can mix it into the potatoes at the end, okay, so what I'm looking for with these potatoes is, first of all, the outside and you should You feel like there's almost a kind of starchy suspension on them, but really what we're looking for is that they are cooked to the center so that a knife can pass through them. I mean, you can even take it out and cut it in half and check if it's still raw and chalky in the center.

I'd say it's about 30 seconds or so and they'll be ready. You're just looking for them to be cooked through, so at this point you have at least a few options. What you want to do is mix these potatoes with some type of fat, so in this case I'm going to use melted butter. You could also use something like duck fat or olive oil or shortening. I would avoid some that you know, they are very tasty fats, so I would avoid something like an extra. Green olive oil or like sesame oil, any type of high temperature safe fat will work here.

What I'm going to do is also add a little bit of parmesan and the idea here is that while this parmesan is

cooking

. with the potatoes it will form like a layer of Freo, you know, a layer like fried cheese on the outside, it's like the crispy edges of a quesadilla, you know, it's definitely not a necessary step, but I think it's a good addition to these . potatoes, so you see, I'm like I'm throwing them relatively roughly right now. I want to encourage the starch on the outside to slide off a little bit and combine with the butter and the cheese and form that kind of layer that's going to coat the outside nicely.

I have a parchment lined baking sheet. Take out these potatoes. It's okay if they touch here and there, but I want them to be on a single layer and, as much as possible, leave some space between them. that air can circulate in the oven and really crisp up all over, they shrink a little bit as they cook, if they touch each other a little bit that's fine, they'll separate from each other as they roast, you'll notice it later. during the initial cooking I did not add any additional salt to this, that is because the cheese is quite salty, if I were to skip the cheese I would throw them with a little salt in that bowl and these will go into a 400° Oven with convection on if you don't have convection use a 425° oven instead, but if you have convection they will brown a little faster and be a little crispier, it's been about 20 minutes.

I'm going to go check the potatoes and if they're ready to turn, we'll turn them, so we're looking for them to be a nice golden blonde color. What we want here is for them to really be like that. nice golden color all over this particular recipe with all the cheese, you don't really want them to get too dark because the cheese will turn bitter, they're really sticking together, eh, okay, so this thing happened that I guess sometimes happens in life. from a recipe developer, is that one of my recipes doesn't work for me, this always happens when I think you're on camera, you usually know that the parchment is coated with a layer of silicone that should make it practically non-stick, but In this case, it doesn't seem to be working that well, so I don't know what to attest to that, but I'm using a fish spatula to gently separate the potatoes from the bottom.

If this happens at home, it's I'm not going to ruin your dinner, it just might take a few more minutes, so at this point we're going to turn them over so they cook evenly, so we're going to turn them over and they'll be back to go directly to the oven. uh and they're going to be done probably in another 15 to 20 minutes or so, you know, like with all baking you want to keep an eye on it like you should never just rely on a timer with what we're looking for. These potatoes are this color so they're a really nice golden brown color, what we don't want is for them to get much darker than this, especially with these parmesan crusted potatoes because the protein in that parmesan can actually tend to turn a little bitter once it starts to brown too much, so this is the level we're looking for and you can already see how crispy it turned out, just a ton of surface area, extra surface area added from both that starch mixture and the parmesan and that's just going to add crunch just because it had a little bit of that extra rosemary in here and I like that fresh rosemary flavor.

I'm going to mix them with some fresh rosemary. Totally optional, most of it will probably fall to the bottom. out of the bowl anyway I'm going to try some oh wow that's crunchy you know at my house we make it every other day it's a utensil optional day so we make a utensils optional meal and a utensils optional meal the fingers. I'm going to do it with my fingers today because I like the feeling of crunchy things between my fingers, nice and creamy on the inside, very nice and moist, but with a very nice crunchy coating on the outside, not pure. parmesan crust is not a pure potato crust, it's this kind of mixture of potato and parmesan, so it has a very nice crunch thanks to the potato starch, but then a very nice flavor thanks to the parmesan, my extra Krispy roast potatoes with parmesan, uh, the secret is to add a little bit of baking soda to the potatoes while you're boiling them, as well as adding that little packet of flavor, a little bit more flavor, more texture overall.

I think it's the best way to roast potatoes I've ever seen, but I hope someone comes up with it. a better way to learn about this recipe or any of my New York Times recipes or any of the other wonderful New York Times recipes nyt cooking.com