Success at Last!

[drplokta]

After six years of trying, I've finally come up with roast potatoes that flickgc admits are as good as her mother's, or possibly even better. She even left some of her chicken and her bacon-wrapped sausages so that she could have second and third helpings of the spuds.

(Desiree potatoes, cut into large pieces and parboiled for ten minutes with the peelings in the pan to add flavour, left to stand for half an hour, and then roast in lots of pre-heated groundnut oil with a little salt for 70 minutes at 190°C in a fan-assisted oven, turning once. It would have been better to turn them out onto kitchen roll as soon as they came out of the oven, to mop up the oil and stop the surplus ones from getting greasy. You could add a little lemon juice and/or a few garlic cloves, if you felt like it.)

We also had chicken cooked with tarragon, lemon and white wine, gravy made from the chicken juices, roast parsnips in maple syrup (thanks to feorag for the suggestion), chipolatas wrapped in bacon (Sillfield Farm now sells pre-wrapped chipolatas), and petits pois (just to pretend that it might not be entirely unhealthy).

Full now. We might have a little stroll round the dock to feed left-overs to the swans before having some Green & Black's white chocolate and raspberry ice cream with a bottle of tokaj.

Comments

[flick.livejournal.com]

the surplus ones

The what now...?

Urp. Think I might asplode....

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Is groundnut oil peanut oil, or is it something else? Kitchen roll must mean paper towels. Fan-assisted oven is clearly a convection oven, but we don't have chipolatas. Must google that.

Merry Christmas!

K.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Ah, chipolatas are some sort of sausage. I guessed something in the onion family, no doubt because of those Italian onions.

K.

[drplokta]

Peanut oil, yes.

[guybles.livejournal.com]

I'm all about the hard animal fats when it comes to roast potatoes.

Maris are acceptable I suppose, but I would always favour King Edwards. These were peeled and blanched in salted water for less than five minutes, then shoogled in the pan before being left for about an hour to dry out. Roasted in beef dripping at about 150°C for around 70 minutes, by which time they had reached perfection.

However, because the rib of beef took slightly longer to roast than I expected, I had to take them out. Thus, I had overly crunchy potatoes that had to be reheated.

On the other hand, I have a huge amount of cold beef to eat. Lucky I bought a new jar of horseradish.

Anyway, the idea of boiling with the peelings is an interesting one. I shall give that a try, the next time I try roasting.

[kim-huett.livejournal.com]

Chipolatas wrapped in bacon? You mean pigs in blanket! It's just not the same if you don't use the tradidional name you know. And Green & Black do ice cream now eh? We only get the choclate and I suspect that's all we'll ever get. The supermarket chains here are not keen to be too adventurous when it comes to ice cream.