Celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal reveals his secret to perfect roast potatoes

Chef Heston Blumenthal has experimented with various methods in his quest for the perfectly crispy spud.

The celebrity chef has thought long and hard about the Sunday staple – here are his tips for achieving a glass-like crunch and fluffy centre.

To book a table for the new Sunday roast at Dinner by Heston, Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant at the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge, you don’t reserve a time. You reserve a batch of potatoes.

Everyone knows the spuds are the best part of any decent roast dinner: Heston and his head chef, Adam Tooby-Desmond, are simply enshrining it in fact and making them the focal point of the whole meal: it is called “Sunday Roast Potato Time”.

As you would expect from the man who gave the world bacon and egg ice cream and taught a generation of British diners about “molecular gastronomy”, in which flavours were broken down almost to the atomic level, Blumenthal has thought long and hard on the topic of roast potatoes. Unlike many of his dishes, they are something that is not only possible, but perhaps preferable to cook in a domestic kitchen.

“Roast potatoes is one of those dishes where most people say ‘my mum or my grandmother’s were the best’,” Blumenthal explains over coffee in Dinner’s kitchen. “And one of the reasons is that what you do at home for a roast is hard to do in a commercial kitchen. At home you can do all the veg beforehand and reheat it last minute, roast the meat and let it sit for a good hour. The potatoes, however, only have the smallest of windows. When they’re ready, they’re ready. If you have to hold them for half an hour, they’re not the same. The crust starts to get a bit chewy. Doing them in batches was the only way I could think of getting them like you’d get them at home.”

The critical factor in potatoes, he says, is water content. A lot of his research for roasties overlaps with his quest for the perfect chip.

“I want the centre to be moist and fluffy and the outside to have that glass-like crunch,” he says. “If your water content is too high, your potatoes aren’t going to crisp. If your dry content is too high, the potatoes get crumbly and fall apart. Some potatoes are not fit for purpose. Things like this make people think they can’t cook.” (In his restaurants, Blumenthal currently uses Agria potatoes though he recommends Albert Bartlett Rooster, Burgundy Red or Maris Pipers as good all-rounders.)

Blumenthal has made many guest appearances on MasterChef Australia. He and his head chef Adam Tooby-Desmond have made potatoes the focus of the new Sunday roast at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal in London. Photo / Network 10

He experimented with different methods of drawing excess water out of the potatoes – pin-pricking them, vacuum cooking them – only to conclude that the crucial element is the boiling. “That first cooking stage in the water is crucial,” he says. You want to peel them, cut them into quarters or eighths to maximise corners, and rinse them, before an intense boil.

“People say ‘parboil’, but you want to cook them quite heavily until they start to break up, skimming off any excess starch that builds up. It might sound counterintuitive to dry potatoes out by simmering them in boiling water, but with all the cracks and fissures there’s a much bigger surface area for crispness, and the oil and fat can run into them.”

Rather than tipping them out into a colander to steam-dry, he recommends lifting them carefully with a slotted spoon onto a drying rack, so they have room to cool. No chuffing is required; if you have boiled them correctly, the violent shaking would destroy them.

“As they cool, the starch crystallises on the outside of the potatoes, so they become harder and sturdier again.” This is the moment where you could keep them in the fridge or the freezer and roast them the next day.

He recommends cooking them in olive oil which has been pre-heated in an oven to 180C. “You have to use enough oil,” he says. “You’ve made all the cracks, so if you haven’t got enough oil they won’t go crispy. I use about a centimetre of oil in the tray.

Then cook at 180C for between an hour to an hour and 20 minutes, turning occasionally. Right at the end, add rosemary and garlic, just to release the flavours.”

Put them back in the oven for 15 to 20 minutes and there you have it. And the best thing about perfect roast potatoes is they are not just good for Christmas, they are a skill for life, too.

The Sunday Roast ‘Potato Time’ is available on Sundays at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal in London from October 13, priced £98 ($210) per person