Everyone has fancy schmancy recipes for roasted potatoes. They're all crap. Potatoes don't need rosemary or honey or paprika to be awesome. The key isn't in the spices. The key is in how you cook them.
During recent months I've probably made more roasted potatoes than the rest of the world combined. Seriously. The boyfriend could literally live off of potatoes. And you might now surmise that he must be a big fat fuck, but you would be wrong. He's pretty much the antithesis of a fat fuck. In fact he could probably stand to put on a few pounds...
Anyway. The key to roasted potatoes is getting them crispy. Soggy smushy potatoes suck, as do undercooked one.
As a disclaimer before I begin, there is nothing healthy about most of my recipes. You can try and substitute less fattening shit, but I guarantee that this will fuck up the recipe and make your food taste like crap.
And with that, here goes:
- 2.5 pounds yellow or white potatoes (that would be half a 5 pound bag for the math rejects out there)
- 1 stick butter - and use REAL butter
- Salt and Pepper to taste (I like to use Lawreys seasoned pepper, but use whatever you want)
Those are the only ingredients you need for kick-ass potatoes. Seriously. I shit you not.
OK, so first you peel the potatoes and then you cut them into large bite-sized pieces, like a piece that you could shove in your mouth all at once if you were eating at a medieval feast and had a fist-sized fork in one hand and a giant turkey leg in the other, but that may make more sense to cut into a couple of smaller bites on any other occasion. So for your average potato, this means cutting it into quarters.
Throw all your potatoes into a pot of water with a good slug of salt and then bring them to a boil on the stove. Cook them until they are just tender enough to get a fork into them with little difficulty, but try not to overcook them to the point that the outsides are mushy.
Once your patoots are cooked through, drain them and then pour them into a shallow, butter-greased baking pan (use the stick you've got on hand).
Spread out the potatoes so that all of them are touching the bottom of the pan and none is piled on top of another.
Melt the rest of your stick of butter and then pour it as evenly as you can over your potatoes.
Season with salt and pepper and then bake them in the oven at 350 for at least 90 minutes (I prefer closer to 2 hours). The longer you bake them the crisper they get. The side of each potato that is touching the pan will get a really nice crunchy buttery crust - this is the key to the most awesome roasted potatoes.
You can also bake them around a roast which makes them even more awesome because the potatoes will absorb the juices.
And there you have it. Come to think of it, it's sort of a stupid recipe. I mean, how hard is it to roast potatoes, right? But the thing is that most peoples' (and restaurants') roasted potatoes suck ass, so I guess it must be pretty hard.
Anyway, here's a picture of some leftover potatoes that the boyfriend housed in one sitting. Next time I make them (which will probably be soon), I'll try and get a better picture of them fresh from the oven, though don't hold yer breath on that one because my memory sucks donkey balls.
