Tender roasted potatoes to go with almost any meal.
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We booked our honeymoon tickets to Portugal last year before knowing that their cuisine was pretty much made for us: plenty of super fresh fish, flaky custard tarts, juicy oranges, and buttery, tender roasted potatoes. The kind of potatoes that make you reconsider your love for hash browns as your favorite potato preparation (don't worry, more to come on this soon).
We might as well have a picture of the potatoes up on the wall with our honeymoon pics for the amount of time that I’ve spent thinking about them. I’ve tested multiple different ways to create the garlicky goodness: boiling them made them too mushy. Roasting them made them too dry. Roasting them covered sealed in some moisture but that buttery flavor still wasn’t there.
Then, finally it hit me one day -- what if I did both? Start with a quick boil in some salt water, strain it, and then finish it off in a bath of salty garlic olive oil? The results did not disappoint-- the tenderness of the flesh was perfectly balanced out by the crisp and salty garlic skin.
True to Portuguese form, I grilled up some salmon to go along with them and the flavors brought us back. Now only to figure out those egg custards and we’ll have the kind of Portuguese spread I’ve only ever dreamed about.
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Portuguese Potatoes
Ingredients
- 1 ½ lbs (or 680 g) small roasting potatoes red or golden skins, washed
- 2 T. (or 15 mL) olive oil
- 3 cloves garlic chopped (or 1 ½ tsp. minced garlic)
- ¾ tsp. (or 4.2 g) Salt
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 425 degrees.
- Cover potatoes with cold, heavily salted water (it should taste like sea water) in an ovenproof dutch oven pan. Cover and bring to a boil over high heat on the stove top and boil for 7 minutes.
- Drain potatoes, keeping them in the pan, and toss them with oil, garlic and salt until the potatoes are thoroughly covered.
- Cover potatoes again and bake for 22-24 minutes, stirring and tossing the potatoes about halfway through again, or until the potatoes pierce easily with a fork.
- Season with any additional salt or pepper if desired and serve hot.
