How to roast potatoes.

An easy guide to the perfect roast potato.

The perfect roast potato should be crispy on the out side and soft and fluffy in the inside. To achieve this you need to do a number of things but to start with you must get the right kind of potato.

For the best roast potatoes you would be best using King Edwards, Maris Piper, Pentlands Dell, Romano, Cara or Desiree. Out of all of them I would ether use Desiree or Cara as they seem to have a good all-round use as well so if you are going to buy potatoes you want to be able to use them for more than just roasting. The Desiree has a more waxy texture when cooked that you do have to make sure they are fully cooked to get the real roast potato. Also if you look in the shop these are the two most common produced potatoes that you can get so it makes them very cost effective as well.

So first get you potatoes and wash and peal them then cut them all in to similar sized pieces. The reason for this is that you want your potatoes to all cook at the same time. If you have some that are larger than the other then you run the risk of under cooking them and over cooking the others.

Now take the potatoes and place them in a sauce pan so that they can be completely covered with water. You want a good inch of water over the potatoes as the water get hot and evaporates you want the potatoes to be coved still with the water. Add some salt and turn on the heat, bring them to the boil and then simmer. When you can feel that the edges of the potato are soft and cooked but the centre is still hard and under cooked take them of the heat.

Simply drain the water of the potatoes, place them in a colander. When the water is drained away and the potatoes are still hot then ruff up the edges with a fork, or put them back in the pan with the lid ion and give it all a good shake. What you are looking for is a real mused up edges and solid centres. It is the over cooked mused edges that crisp up when cooking that give the roast potato is crunchy outer side.

Now you have your potatoes ready to roast you need some thing to roast them in. The best thing for roasting potatoes in and I can not deny it is goose fat. But for a lot of us we can not get hold of it so we use just vegetable oil, or beef fat. What ever you are going to roast them in all you really want to do is make sure that the fat is hot before you put the potatoes in the fat.

Place the roasting try with the fat in, in the oven to get nice and hot. Then making sure that the potatoes are free from all water, place them in the fat. Yu want to here then sizzle as they hit the fat. Toss the potatoes in the hot fat so that they get a good covering season with salt and fresh ground pepper and place them back in the oven . Once you can see that they have started to go brown take them out and turn them so the cook on all sides. You can do this several times until you are happy with your potatoes.

Then what you should have are crispy outside and fluffy potato in the inside. If you are serving then with a roast meat then just toss them around the roasting tin with the meat before serving to get all the lovely roasting juices on them before you make the gravy.

And that is how to make the prefect roast potato, you boil, bash and then roast.