How I 'made a potato really taste like a potato', with Delia Smith | Food
How I 'made a potato really taste like a potato', with Delia Smith
This article is more than 7 years oldSaffron spuds roasted in olive oil – is it really worth all the extra fuss?
“How to make a potato really taste like a potato?” That’s the question Delia sets the reader when she embarks on her recipe for roast potatoes.
The answer, Delia writes, “is to begin by rediscovering a healthy respect for what a potato actually is”. This sounds more like the beginning of a self-help book than a recipe – an impression that is only strengthened by Delia’s diktat that the potato must be “loved and valued”.
I must admit, if I were a foodstuff, and someone was only willing to eat me after adding creme fraiche, pepper, salt and milk, I’m not wholly convinced I would feel either valued or loved. Tolerated and/or used as bulk, perhaps. Loved, less so.
After preparing so many different types of mash last week, my strong suspicion was that Delia doesn’t actually like potatoes very much, which is why so many of her potato recipes use the potato as a blank slate on which other, more exciting flavours can take centre-stage.
Many of Delia's potato recipes use the potato as a blank slate on which more exciting flavours can take centre-stageThat suspicion hardened into near-certainty this week, when I embarked on Delia’s recipe for “crunchy roast potatoes with saffron”. I am not convinced that a recipe that calls for you to “paint the potatoes with saffron oil” can honestly claim to be “making a potato really taste like a potato”.
Although there are a variety of recipes I approach with trepidation and/or an immediate desire to work out where I can cut corners on a weekday, roast potatoes are not one. Roast potatoes are something I know how to cook: parboiled until they begin to come apart at the seams, then roasted either in the leftover fat from the last roast or in sunflower oil.
If the word “saffron” made me feel somewhat ill-disposed to this recipe, seeing the words “olive oil” only heightened my unease. Olive oil is for risotto and pasta sauces. Then I saw two words and knew then that Delia and I were really going to fall out this week. The first word was “pestle”. The second was “mortar”. This was clearly going to be a recipe with far too much hard work.
In a small kitchen such as mine, a pestle and mortar feels like an unnecessary affectation. Let’s face it, they are, for most people, more kitchen decorations than kitchen implements.
Show me a household where the pestle and mortar is in regular use and I’ll show you a household where no one works long hours or has small children. The whole recipe develops on similar lines – it’s not bad; it’s just all unnecessarily complex – Delia suggests using a skewer to test whether the potatoes are parboiled. What’s wrong with a fork?
But after you’ve used your skewer and shaken your parboiled potatoes in the pan and brushed them with saffron oil, you will have potatoes that have a wonderful texture, but a strange flavour, having taken about half as much energy again to make as potatoes with the same texture and a better flavour if you’d only kept the leftover fat from your last roast dinner and hadn’t messed around with a mortar and pestle for the best part of a quarter of an hour. But I’ll say this – the saffron oil does make a wonderful addition to Delia’s excellent recipe for gravy, so not all is lost.
- Stephen Bush is cooking his way through Delia’s Complete How To Cook (BBC Books, £40) in a year; @stephenkb. You can watch Delia Smith’s free Online Cookery School videos at deliaonline.com; @deliaonline
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