That’s especially important if you use duck or goose fat, which develops off flavours if the oven is too hot.Īnd talking of ovens, it’s important to know yours. And you shouldn’t use a very high heat,” he explained. Isn’t it heresy to use extra-virgin oil at high heat? “I like it here. Palmer-Watts, to my surprise, glugged a mild extra-virgin olive oil into the tin. Now, having created that perfectly cooked inside, it’s time to get the outside right.
And it turns out time – and patience – are key components to the perfect roast spuds, which should have “a perfectly cooked inside and an almost glassy-crisp outside,” explained Palmer-Watts.Īfter draining the potatoes, the chef advises, there’s no shaking them in the colander, as they should be falling apart a bit already, but they do need to cool, which will dry them even more. But in the sleek grey and white test kitchen, the three clocks on the back wall showed the times in London, Melbourne and Dubai. Heston was not beetling around inside: he was in Provence for research, exploring the minerality of foods. I could talk all day about them,” he admitted to me when I visited the Fat Duck Experimental Kitchen, on an industrial estate near Maidenhead, in 2018. “I am the most pedantic person about roast potatoes. Roast potatoes are always front and centre. The chef worked for 20 years under Heston Blumenthal, launched his two-Michelin-star restaurant Dinner, in London, in 2011, and oversaw the kitchen at Blumenthal’s Michelin-starred Hind’s Head in Bray.īut Sundays are spent cooking lunch (nine times out of 10 a roast chicken), for his wife, Emma, and children, Max and Sophia. But potatoes that are anything other than cracklingly crisp, hot and golden, are a dinner disaster.Īshley Palmer-Watts well understands the power of the roastie. If the meat is a bit dry, you can slosh extra gravy on, and soggy greens are the sort of thing generations bond over. A roast dinner stands or falls on its potatoes.
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