I love them served up first thing in the morning as breakfast potatoes, or hot outta the oven to go with dinner. I love them old-school dipped in ketchup or honey mustard sauce, or (nowadays in Spain) aioli and romesco. I love them sprinkled with heaps of freshly-grated Parmesan, or a good squeeze of lemon juice. I love them spicy, I love them herby, I love them citrusy, I love them cheesy, and I always love them extra-garlicky. But the one non-negotiable?
So today, I thought I would show you my base recipe for making the best oven roasted potatoes. I’ve also included three easy options for how to season them (shown above), plus lots and lots of other seasoning suggestions below. The techniques featured here to make the potatoes extra-crispy are the same ones featured in my baked sweet potato fries recipe, and they’ve never let me down. So if you’re looking to serve roasted potatoes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or even the upcoming holidays, give this recipe a try and let me know how it goes!
An overcrowded pan will turn a sauna into a steam bath; Your potatoes will cook, but they’ll be soft, moist, and bland like steamed potatoes. Even if you’re tempted to save dishes by throwing a mound of potatoes onto one baking sheet, parsing them out over two will give them the space they need to crisp up.
Crispy Roasted Potatoes Ingredients:
To make this oven roasted potatoes recipe, you will need:
- Red potatoes: Organic, if possible, and scrubbed so that they are nice and clean. If you prefer, you could also use Russets or Yukon Gold potatoes for this recipe. But I’m partial to red potatoes.
- Olive oil: Or any cooking oil that you prefer.
- Cornstarch: As mentioned above, to help the potatoes crisp up.
- Seasonings: I always begin with a simple base of garlic powder and freshly-cracked black pepper. But see below for extra seasoning suggestions that you can add to this!
- Sea salt: Fine sea salt, which we will sprinkle on at the very end.
A particularly difficult tip for all of us pickers and prodders (poke, poke, poke) but an important one: In order to develop crisp edges, your potatoes must have sustained contact with the hot surface. In other words, no touchy! Give the potatoes time to get nice and familiar with that sheet tray or skillet—in a single layer, please!—before scooting them around. If your potatoes threaten to stick (drats!), take a deep breath and step away for a minute or so: They’ll release when they’re ready and if you force them, they just might leave all of those crispy edges you’ve worked so hard to achieve behind. And we all know the pan will never appreciate them as much as you will.
Not only does that initial cook guarantee that your potatoes will ultimately emerge 100% tender, it also allows the starches in the potato to soften and expand. Then, when that potato cools, the starch recrystallizes, giving you, in the words of J. Kenji López-Alt in The Food Lab, “a dehydrated layer of gelatinized starch […,] much like when you fry a french fry.” The clumped starch mixes with the fat—more on that below—to form a “potato-oil paste” that “acts almost like a batter for fried foods, creating an extra layer of crispness as the potatoes roast.”
Sure, if you’re trying to go from raw potato to dinner in under an hour, you might not have time to let your potatoes cool. But there’s also power in the knowledge that the bowl of boiled potatoes in the fridge from Sunday can become orbs of crispy goodness on Wednesday and will actually yield better results. (Now that’s what I call meal planning!)4. Rough them up.
Because potatoes are dense, with a relatively low water content compared to vegetables like broccoli or winter squash, they take a while to cook. If you roast them at too high a temperature, you risk browning the outsides before the insides are cooked through. Cook them for too long at a lower temp, though, and they may dry out (telltale signs: leathery, tough) on their way to Tender Town.
The math is simple: More surface area = more opportunities for starches to mingle with fat = more contact between hot pan and your potato = crispier all over. So while you can slice potatoes cleanly or leave them whole, the potatoes that are rough around the edges produce the crispiest results.
Why Aren’t Your Potatoes Crispy Enough?
FAQ
Why are my oven potatoes not crispy?
Why are my potatoes still hard after cooking in the oven?
Why is my baked potato skin not crispy?
Why are my potatoes soggy and not crispy?