Nigella Lawson Reveals The ‘Secret Step’ to Make Perfect, Crispy Roast Potatoes: ‘You Want Them...’

Sweet, tangy, lemony, garlicky, fiery, syrupy, mildly spicy: recipes sit on the buffet table like contestants of a fashion show, each bringing in their own X-factor that would soon attract the growling belly of a hungry watcher. Roasted potatoes bring to the table a flirtatious contrast of textures married with a hotpot of spices. It is almost a seductive experience to bite into the crispy golden exterior to discover a mushy potatoey goodness locked within. Their reputation spans beyond both time and fiction. In Harry Potter’s Hogwarts Great Hall’s dinner banquet, they became a product of celebration.

In the novel Jane Eyre, they became an object of an orphan woman’s imagination, wherein she dreamed of eating "roasties" with bread and milk to amuse her spiritual hunger. In real life, though, imagination alone isn’t enough to cook a tray of roasties. Therefore, TV cook Nigella Lawson shares her “secret steps” on how to cook these perfect roast potatoes, per her website.

Nothing, Lawson says, gives the “contended glow of achievement that cooking a good tray of roast potatoes does.” And even though she is anti-perfectionist, when it comes to this snack, she prefers perfection. “It is impossible to cook roast potatoes without needing them to be perfect, which to me means sweet and soft inside and a golden-brown carapace of crunch without,” the celebrity cook said.

The first thing to pay attention to is how well one cushions the potatoes in thick, creamy layers of fat. The fat coating the potatoes needs to be at a high temperature unless it becomes “frighteningly hot” in the oven. “If it’s not searingly hot, you don’t stand a chance,” Lawson warned. The second factor is the size of the potatoes. Explaining what should be the ideal size, she wrote, “You want them relatively small, so that the ratio of crunchy outside to fluffy interior is optimized.”

Another thing to notice while making roasted potatoes is the dredging. “This is a family practice, inherited through the maternal line — in semolina rather than flour after parboiling, then really rattling the pan around to make the potatoes a bit mashed on the surface so they catch more in the hot fat, is a major aid,” the cook explained. The best potatoes, according to Lawson, for this recipe are either "King Edward's" or "Yukon Gold."

But before any of these steps can be followed, there’s another crucial tip that Lawson suggests to her fellow cooks. It’s about peeling the potatoes the right way. She recommended peeling the potatoes a day before turning them into roast potatoes. “Keep submerged, whole, in cold water in a cold place,” she said, adding, “Peel the potatoes, and cut each one into 3 by cutting off each end at a slant so that you are left with a wedge or triangle in the middle.” The process might sound too arduous, but as Alan Watts said, sometimes Zen is simply in peeling the potatoes. So, follow your Zen and you’ll end up with a tray of tantalizing potatoes. Piping hot!