A simple but specific potato recipe.
Ingredients
New potatoes (I like Row 7 Seeds’ Upstate Abundance potatoes, pictured)
Salted Kerrygold butter (non-negotiable)
Salt (my standard kitchen salt is Murray River Salt)
Dry mustard powder (I’ll never move on from Flamingo Estate’s Okinawan hot mustard, RIP)
Garlic powder (I use Burlap & Barrel’s)
Method
Preheat the oven to 425˚F.
Scrub the potatoes and place them in a pot. Add a generous amount of salt and just enough water to cover by half an inch.
Bring the water to a boil. Once boiling, set a timer for 6 minutes.
While the potatoes are boiling, mix together equal amounts dry mustard and garlic powder in a small dish. Add salt to taste. All salts have different salinity levels, so I can’t tell you how much to use. Start tasting all your salts so you can do this intuitively.
Once the timer goes off, check the potatoes. When they can be pierced easily with a fork, turn off the stove. Drain the water, but keep the potatoes in the pot.
Add some butter to the hot potatoes. Roll the potatoes around inside the pan until the butter is melted and the potatoes are all well coated. Let the potatoes sit in the butter, rolling them around occasionally, until they stop giving off steam.
Sprinkle the dry spice mixture over the potatoes and continue rolling them around until they’re more or less evenly coated.
Pour the potatoes to a baking dish and add a few knobs of butter throughout the dish (not more than 2 tablespoons total). Use a silicone spatula to scrape the excess butter and spices off the inside of the cooking pot, and add that to the baking dish too.
Sprinkle the tops of the potatoes in the baking dish with about half the remaining spice mixture.
Bake for 20 minutes. Take the potatoes out of the oven, roll them around in the baking dish to coat evenly in the browning butter, and sprinkle yet again with the remaining spices. Put them back in the oven.
Bake for another 15 minutes, then take them out of the oven and turn the oven off. Roll the potatoes around in the brown butter one last time, then transfer them to a serving dish.
Allow the potatoes to cool for 5-10 minutes before trying to eat them. Since they’re cooked whole inside the skin, they can hold a lot of heat for a long time. They’re easier to enjoy once they’ve cooled down a fair bit.
I’m the kind of autist who thinks a huge plate of potatoes is a meal. I will also eat an entire slab of salmon with no sides and not even a sauce, and to me that’s acceptable. But if you prefer your meals to be macro balanced, may I suggest pairing these with a simple butter-basted steak and a huge side of garlicky sautéed spinach? Perhaps a tannic red wine to pair?
My suggestion: have the steak sitting at room temperature the whole time you’re working on the potatoes. Prepare the sautéed greens while the potatoes bake in the oven. Only after the potatoes are finally out of the oven, salt and season the steak and pan-sear it immediately so there’s no time for moisture to develop on the surface. By the time the steak is cooked and rested, the potatoes shouldn’t be burning-hot anymore.
