Roasted Red Potatoes with Bacon and Onion Recipe - The Cookie Rookie® (2024)

FAQs

Why do you soak potatoes before roasting? ›

These tips are completely doable, actually pretty much fail-proof. SOAK your potato chunks in cold water. This removes some of the starch and helps get them super duper crispy. Soak them at least one hour.

Red potatoes are great for roasting, cooking in soups, or boiling or steaming for potato salad. The waxy nature of the flesh means they'll maintain their shape, but it also means they will get gluey when overworked, so you'll want to choose a different potato for mashing.

In a video online, Gordon explained: “For crispy roast potatoes, you can depend on them, my tip is to parboil them, leave them to steam dry, then sprinkle them with semolina or flour, and then give them a good roughing up.”

If you want to make this roast potatoes day before recipe and keep the potatoes crispy, ensure you put them in hot oil before baking them. This will help the potatoes stay crispy. If you're preparing roast potatoes in advance and find they have gone soggy in the fridge.

Soaking potatoes in water helps remove excess starch. Excess starch can inhibit the potatoes from cooking evenly as well as creating a gummy or sticky texture on the outside of your potatoes. Cold water is used because hot water would react with the starch activating it, making it harder to separate from the potatoes.

A: The main reasons to cut the potatoes and pre-soak in water are: To allow the excess starches and sugars to be removed from the outer surface of the fry strips AND to keep the potatoes from browning prematurely from exposure to air. Covering in water helps the potato from turning a dark color.

Neutral, low-cost oil such as vegetable oil, canola oil, safflower oil, peanut oil, corn oil, coconut oil, avocado oil, etc., work well for roasting. These oils have a high smoke point, allowing the potatoes to get very hot to achieve maximum crispiness.

Red potatoes are an excellent source of flavonoid antioxidants like quercetin, kaempferol-rutinose, catechin, and rutin. Red potatoes contain twice the amount of flavonoids as compared to white potatoes. 6They're also a rich source of several nutrients, including vitamin C and potassium.

Boil chunks of potato until they're just tender, toss them none-too-gently with fat (ideally beef drippings) to rough up their surface, then roast them until they're crisp and crackling. The boiling and roughing-up steps are the real keys.

And potatoes are even more confusing: you can both roast and bake a potato, but a roast potato aims for crispiness, while a baked potato aims for softness.

What are the best tasting potatoes for roasting? ›

Yukon Golds fall right in the middle of the spectrum.

This is the real beauty of the Yukon Gold, what makes them the best potatoes for roasting. The crisp. The creaminess. The texture.

To have a truly marvellous roast potato, one must simply let the potato dry completely after parboiling, before roasting in extremely hot fat. If you have two ovens you can cook them separately to your roast at a different temperature.

If you over-crowded the pan so that there isn't enough space for the potatoes to rest on the pan without touching each other, it will prevent the water from evaporating and making the potatoes crispy. You can always try to broil the potatoes for 1-2 minutes to crisp them up at the end of baking if necessary.

Also, be mindful of the oil. Potatoes can react like sponges; too much oil can make your potatoes appear to be soggy. Try placing oil in a spray bottle or using an aerosol to apply the oil to the potatoes. Lastly, ensure that the potatoes are dry before you add the oil.

If you're pressed for time, the slightly sticky, cut potatoes should be soaked for a minimum of 15 minutes. However, a longer soak time may allow more starch to be removed. So, if you can prep the fries ahead of time, a few hours of soaking can help make them even crispier.

2. Give them a cold water bath: Once your potatoes are chopped, toss them into a large bowl. Then cover the potatoes completely with cold water and let them soak for at least 30 minutes (or up to overnight). This will help to rinse off the excess starch and help the potatoes crisp up beautifully in the oven.

Soak the potatoes in water for at least 4 hours, up to overnight. This step is crucial to really get all of the excess starch off. Fill a large pot with water, rinse off the potatoes one last time and add them to the cold water. Salt the water, place the pot on the stove and turn on the heat.

Soak raw potatoes in a container for up to four hours. The potatoes should be fully submerged to prevent oxidation and discoloration. After four hours, the potatoes should be rinsed with cold water. Chopping, cutting or otherwise slicing the potatoes will excrete more starch.