We all have Christmas traditions, and often that revolves around food. Katherine and I have spent our 6 years together slowly perfecting our Christmas selection.
I thought I would share how we make our awesome crispy Christmas potatoes (you can eat them when its not Christmas too, if you want!).
Disclaimer: I am a proud member of the chuck-it-in-it’ll-be-fine school of cooking. I firmly believe a happy cook just throws stuff in a pan, rather than measuring 18g of this and 3.5 medium egg yolks of that; so take my measurements with a pinch of salt, so to speak. This recipe makes as many potatoes as you need. I usually plan for 1-2 large potatoes per person.
Ingredients
- Potatoes.
- Flour.
- Olive oil.
- Salt and Pepper (I like to use my salt and pepper shakers set in my kitchen)
Recipe
- Peel and chop up your potatoes. You want biggish lumps – cut big potatoes into 4 pieces, small ones into halves.
- Boil up your potatoes with a little salt in the water (helps them get softer).
- Check them after about 15-20mins: you should be able to stick a knife in them, but you don’t want them completely soft either.
- Drain the water.
- Chuck some in a metal colander, so there are about 8 pieces of potatoes in it (use a big bowl if you don’t have a colander). If you have lots of potatoes, you might want to do them in a few batches, 8-10 at a time.
- Jiggle the colander for about 10-20 seconds. This bashes up all the edges of the potatoes, making them uneven. This leads to lots of extra crispy bits.
- Have a bowl with olive oil in, and one with flour in.
Roll each potato in the oil, so its covered, then roll in in the flour. Oil + flour = more crispy.
- Sprinkle a little more oil on top, and grind loads of salt and pepper all over it.
- By now, your potatoes should look something like the photo on the right (click for bigger picture).
- Cook them at 180°C ish in the oven. You’ll want to take it out a few times and stir it around with a spatula so that it gets cooked evenly.
- When they are golden, with some crispy brown bits, cover them in gravy and eat them all up.
If you don’t like gravy, then I’m afraid you are a bad person, and you are not allowed to make my potatoes.
We do something similar but when in Africa we mix mukisi mix with the flour