I consider roast potatoes the pinnacle of mankind’s achievements. If any kind of food deserves a recipe, it is roast potatoes. So despite the title of this blog and my ravings against the need for recipes, I unashamedly present my roast potato recipe (pictures taken during my recent adventures with roast chicken kindly supplied by Abel & Cole):

My perfect roast potato recipe includes elements I’ve unashamedly nicked from Gordon and Jamie. If you want more of their genius, I can highly recommend:

• Jamie’s very accessible “making you a better cook”
• If you’re after something more complicated, Gordon’s “recipes from a 3 star chef”
• For general reading, I enjoyed both of Gordon’s biog-style books: “humble pie” and “playing with fire”

Anyway, the recipe:

• Pick good potatoes. This is really important. Don’t go for general “white potatoes” – pick a variety. Maris Pipers are good. So are King Edwards. Experiment and you’ll find your preferences.
• Either peel ‘em or don’t. Try it both ways. You get a difference kind of roastie each way and both rock in my opinion.
• Chop them, but only into large chunks. There’s a place for tiny roast potatoes, but for now, big is easiest. I tend to chop your average size potato into 2 or 3 chunks.
• Par-boil by throwing in cold water with some salt and bringing to the boil. Don’t go much further than just bringing them to the boil.
• Drain and shake – you want to rough them up a little – either shake them in the colander or in the pan
• Fry them. This is a crucial step (you can even skip the par-boil if you are truly lazy, but don’t skip this). You want to fry them in your roasting dish (incidentally, Amazon have a sale on Le Creuset at the moment – get some while you can). The pinnacle of roast potatoes use goose fat, but if you don’t have that to hand, my preference is just to cover the bottom of the roasting dish with sunflower oil (which has different qualities at high temperature to olive oil), throw the potatoes in, shake ‘em around and then add some olive oil on top for flavour. Fry them over a high-ish hob adding salt and pepper. You aren’t trying to cook them through, but simply get a bit of colour and get them started – experiment to see how far you want to cook them. You will need to turn them carefully and often to avoid sticking.
• Throw them in the oven on a really high heat – this is often when you move the meat down so you can often keep the oven on the same temperature and shuffle things around if you’re cooking with gas
• Crucially don’t turn them from this point on. This gets you the dry crispiness you want and makes sure they are crunchy without over-cooking. Also, you don’t risk breaking them – you only have to get a spatula under them once to serve them. If they are getting a bit crispy without looking like they are cooking evenly, turn the temperature down a bit
• After about 45 minutes, when they look ready, serve them. The whole process will have taken a little over an hour to this point
• Mmmmmmmmm.

If you want to be more adventurous once you’ve nailed the basics, you can experiment with throwing all kinds of things in late in the process (20-25 minutes before serving). I’ve had fun with:

• Cherry tomatoes
• Goat’s cheese
• Rosemary
• Garlic (whole cloves)

I was recently very excited to get an offer from Abel and Cole (who deliver organic fruit to us at work every week) of a free range chicken. They’d read about my nascent blog here and wanted to send me a chicken to roast. I have included some pictures below (along with some pictures of the roast potatoes I did to go with them):

I was probably more excited about the prospect of cooking a roast on a work night than I should have been. I was also excited about writing it up for No More Recipes – I wanted to talk about cooking roast chicken without a recipe.

There are loads of places that talk about cooking at exactly this temperature for exactly that long. I don’t cook it like that.

Here’s the entirety of my roast chicken cooking process:

• Get a chicken (take out the giblets – I’ve forgotten that before – it’s a mistake!)
• Turn the oven on high (I used gas mark 9)
• Olive oil, sea salt, pepper, lemon juice over the top of the chicken in an open roasting dish
• Stick the squeezed-out lemon and some crushed garlic inside the chicken
• Throw the chicken in the oven while beginning the potato-roasting process
• When the potatoes go in, I move the chicken down to the bottom of the oven which means I don’t have to change the temperature of the oven and can do the roasties nice and crispy
• Baste it every so often and when everything’s cooked (juices running clear from the chicken) put it to one side to rest. Expect 1-1.5 hours for the whole thing up to this point – there’s enough leeway in the rest of the process to allow for variances in temperature / size of bird etc.
• Make a gravy from the juices. Stick the roasting pan on the hob and add a bit of flour (I use spelt flour), some water (from boiling veg if possible), some Dijon mustard. I have no idea how much of any of these things I add – have a play and see what works for you. Other fun ingredients include: some kind of alcohol for the deglazing (wine, sherry, masala…), stock if you’ve got it made yet (see below), herbs and spices etc. Knock yourself out
• Serve it!

Making a chicken stock

Making a chicken stock is one of those things that sounds like it might be ‘real cooking’ with recipes to follow etc. but it’s actually one of the very easiest things to do (and one of the hardest things to get wrong). The basic principle is boiling left over bits for ages in loads of water alongside anything with a bit of flavour. Then strain and keep the clear stock. You can freeze it and keep for ages – great for making risotto in particular.

Here are some things I like to throw in as well as the chicken carcas and giblets:

• Olive oil
• Good quality salt
• Whole peppercorns
• Bay leaf
• Any other herbs I can lay my hands on
• Chopped up chillies or dried chilli (if you fancy a bit of heat to the stock)
• Whole garlic cloves

One other tip to add a bit of extra flavour is to start the whole process with oil and giblets before adding the water and everything else. Just browning it all a little before adding everything else makes for a great start for the stock.