How To Make The Perfect Roast Potatoes

[emmie]

Mine usually come out slightly dry and not what i can buy in a restaurant, has anyone got a blow by blow recipe how to cook the perfect roasties.
including what to cook them in.

[angiealf]

I put peeled halved length ways potatoes in cold water, covered. Bring to the boil then turn off heat and leave in hot water for 10 minutes. Drain, coat lightly in half veg oil and halve butter. put onto baking tray cut side up. Bake 200 approx 45 minutes. Turn half way through cooking.

[EcclesCake]

Really interesting to read all the different techniques.

TBH, some of them have me running for the hills though!

My biggest fail is putting them in the oven too soon.

[Backdrifter]

I'm one of the people Mikey4444 is telling you to ignore, in that I have never found any discernible difference in the end results between parboiling in salted or unsalted water so I always go with unsalted. I largely agree with everything else that's been said. One slight difference is that once drained after parboiling, I leave them in a colander over the empty pan to steam-dry, then put them back in the pan to shake them and rough up the outsides. I then tend to leave them to cool completely, so the parboiling stage I usually do quite a bit earlier than everything else.

I don't add any flour, and most of the time use veg oil, but find that goose fat gives the best results. When pre-heating the fat/oil, I might leave rosemary, thyme and whole unpeeled garlic cloves in the tray to give some flavour, then remove them before adding the spuds.

All the above has unfailingly yielded excellent results; crisp and nicely browned on the outside, fluffy and moist on the inside, and bearing mind your comment at the top, better than what I've generally had in restaurants.

[Backdrifter]

Oh and another thing I've done a few times is add some or all of the peelings to the pan when parboiling, it seems to impart an extra bit of potatoey flavour. Crisping some of the peelings up in the roasting tray is nice too.