Here’s your easiest potato recipe. You’ll love this Mediterranean potatoes recipe for its simplicity as well as its delicious combination of starch, oil and salt we all find so irresistible.
My idea of perfect roasted potatoes includes being quick and easy to prepare and letting the oven do the rest. Why bother with the extra step of boiling the potatoes first if they come out amazing without boiling? And while I’m all for creativity, it’s not needed when the potatoes are perfectly amazing just roasted with sea salt, olive oil and an herb or two.
Roasted Mediterranean Potatoes with Rosemary
These roasted potatoes take about ten minutes to throw together and the rest is up to the oven. After an hour of beautiful Mediterranean aromas of rosemary wafting through your house, the roasted potatoes come out of the oven perfectly creamy on the inside and golden crispy on the outside.
Around our house, we usually eat these easy Mediterranean potatoes with an equally simple Mediterranean meal such as roasted chicken, steak or a baked, maybe salt-encrusted, whole fish stuffed with a sprig of rosemary, and served along side lettuces tossed simply with olive oil and fine sea salt.
These are always such enjoyable and satisfying meals. A meal with crispy salty golden potatoes — made with little effort — always is!
Always on the lookout for potato side dishes? You may also want to check out Thyme Potatoes Anna.
Ingredients
Potatoes, sea salt, olive oil, rosemary. That’s it!
Rosemary
Roasted potatoes in Italy often mean rosemary is involved. Rosemary with roasted potatoes is a traditional part of the Mediterranean diet. If you have fresh rosemary, by all means use it! Otherwise, dried will do just fine.
Did you know?
Rosemary is an evergreen herb native to the Mediterranean, where big bushes grow wild near the coasts. It’s Latin name reflects its habitat: ros marinus, meaning dew of the sea.
Garlic
Some people like to add garlic to their potatoes. Undoubtedly because it’s delicious. The challenge is not burning the garlic into unpleasant bitterness. Thus, tossing in minced garlic at the beginning won’t work with this high heat. Adding it in raw at the end, while healthy, can be pretty strong. Sautéing the garlic beforehand to then add at the end works — but is more work. In Italy, I like how whole cloves of garlic, crushed in their skins, are tossed in.
Potatoes: Choosing the Right Kind
This recipe calls for the yellow kind of potatoes. Yukon Gold potatoes work great. Fingerling potatoes have a beautiful flavor and texture too, although not quite the same crisp and creamy texture combo as the Yukon Golds. Of course, you can use what you have or can get your hands on. Just keep in mind the kind of potato you use will vary the quality of texture you achieve, and therefore level of enjoyment.
- Yukon Gold: less starch/more sugar = more browning than russet/baking potatoes
- Cooking Results: creamy inside, darker golden and crispy outside, flavorful buttery great taste
- Russet (aka Burbanks, Idahos, baking potatoes): starchy = less browning
- Cooking Results: dry and fluffy inside, lighter colored and crispy outside, mild taste.
Note: whatever potatoes you use, avoid green potatoes (See best practices below).
Potato Best Practices
- It’s always a good idea to trim the potatoes well of any damaged parts, as well as any buds/sprouts and green parts that may contain high levels of the toxin solanine.
- Store potatoes in the dark. Light causes them to turn green, elevating the toxic solanine levels.
- Store potatoes in a cool place to prevent them from sprouting. Toxic solanine levels are high around sprouts.
While you can store potatoes in the fridge, that level of coldness breaks the starch chains in the potatoes into sugar, which causes the potatoes to brown more — which may or may not be desirable, depending on the potato.
All potatoes are different, even among the same kind, but russets might fair better in the fridge since they have higher-starch/lower-sugar levels to begin with. Yukon golds already have enough sugar to brown well and might over-brown with more, and according to the wise Shirley Corriher of Kitchenwise, “wreck the fluffy, starchy texture.”
A great tip from Shirley is that if you take the potatoes out of the refrigerator at least a day before, the sugars will reform back into starch. This can be great during the heat of summer, or say, when going on vacation.
How to Make Perfect Roasted Potatoes
You don’t need to do much to achieve a perfectly crispy potato exterior and tender interior. No need to preheat the pan or parboil them first, although, you can do that if you want. I like to keep extra steps and extra pans to the minimum needed for deliciousness — and I have found that what’s needed for roasted potato deliciousness is really not much!
We have roasted hundreds of batches of delicious crispy creamy potatoes through the years without doing anything more than throwing potato wedges on a rimmed sheet pan and tossing them with olive oil, salt and rosemary and putting them in the oven. Someone checks on them a little while later, scrapes them with a metal spatula, loosening any caramelized bits off the pan (which become crispy deliciousness). Someone checks once more around the time they should be about ready. They are then devoured — while asking each other why we didn’t make more.
Cook’s Tips & Notes
- Peeled or unpeeled? Go entirely according to your preference (unless there is green to cut off due to toxic solanine). I personally adore the earthy taste of potato skins.
- If after cutting, you find the type of potatoes you are using particularly starchy, rinse the potatoes wedges of their extra starch, and dry well before cooking to ensure better browning.
- Give the potatoes their space in the pan. You want to fill the sheet pan just right — not too much, not too little. If the pan is too full, with the potatoes packed in tight or on top of each other, they may not crisp enough. If too empty, parts of the pan may scorch.
Reheating Roasted Potatoes
Although not ideal, it’s better to reheat roast potatoes than trying to keep them warm in a hot oven.
The best way to reheat roast potatoes is by re-roasting them at around 400°F (200°C) for around 10 minutes, or just until hot. You can also sauté the roasted potatoes in a skillet to reheat.
Yes, although better fresh, roast potatoes can be frozen. It’s a good idea to freeze them on a tray before transferring them to a bag or freezer container. Defrost and reheat within a few months.
A thin metal spatula is ideal to scrape every bit of potato from the pan to encourage those bits to become crispies — the more crisp bits the better as far as I’m concerned.
Recommended Tools and Sources for Roasted Potatoes
- Peeler with a good potato bud remover (Farberware doesn’t make my favorite anymore, but this Oxo peeler has the same kind of useful tip.)
- Thin metal spatula (A fish turner can be great here too.)
- Rimmed sheet pan (my favorite are from Chicago Metallic), roasting pan, or cast iron skillet
- Olive oil:
- In the US: Extra virgin olive oils in the US are expensive. Trader Giotto’s Sicilian Selezione Extra Virgin Olive Oil is a reasonably priced fruity olive oil that is good to use in cooking as well as for flavor.
- ln the Mediterranean, it’s definitely worth buying bulk olive oil straight from the source. The extra virgin olive oil is amazing in its freshness, color and flavor. An added bonus is that it’s a lot cheaper. You can buy a big stainless steel can (or bottles), and at harvest time in the fall, take a road trip to an olive growing area, find an olive grower or frantoio (olive oil mill), and buy enough of the newly pressed oil for the next 6 months, or year, if you have the storage space. It’s so worthwhile.
Recipe
Ingredients
- 4 to 5 medium Yukon Gold potatoes (around 2lb/1kg), trimmed of any buds, green or damaged parts; left unpeeled or peeled, washed and dried well
- 1½ Tbsp olive oil
- 1 tsp medium fine sea salt or kosher salt
- 3 to 4 sprigs fresh rosemary (around 1 Tbsp), roughly chopped
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 425°F (225°C).
- Cut about a half inch (1cm) cap off of each end of the potato. Next, cut the potato in half lengthwise, and then each half into fairly uniform bite-size wedges.
- Mix: Place potatoes on pan, douse with enough olive oil to coat the potatoes with a generous film of oil. Sprinkle with salt and ¾ of the rosemary and mix well. Spread the potatoes in a single uncrowded layer in the pan, so that they all have room to get crisp.
- Roast in the oven for about 45 minutes, or until soft when pierced and golden crisp.Halfway through, scrape up any potatoes that are stuck to the pan, and redistribute. A thin metal spatula works well. Any bits that are hard to scrape up will caramelize deliciously. At this point, you can squash a few with a fork or potato ricer, and rough them up a bit, to encourage crispiness.Check on them once more during the remaining cooking time, scraping up caramelized bits from the pan, tasting for salt, sprinkling on more fresh rosemary, and giving them one more stir. Enjoy warm.
- Recommended pans: rimmed sheet pan, roasting pan or cast iron skillet
- Garlic Variation: Toss in whole cloves of garlic, crushed in their skins, along with the oil, salt and rosemary.
