Smash Your Roast Potatoes For The Crispiest Possible Results

You can do almost anything with potatoes: Boil them, mash them, stick them into stews, as certain fantasy characters might suggest. If you want deliciously crispy potatoes, however, the wide world of spuds seems to shrink — there are established, specific ways to add a satisfying crunch to a cooked potato. You can roast large chunks of potatoes for a dish with some crunch and a softer interior, but what if you want even crispier potatoes without leaning all the way into paper-thin, sliced up hash browns?

The answer is smashed potatoes. Unlike mashed potatoes, which are creamy and shouldn't have any crunch to them, smashed potatoes are made by boiling spuds, mashing them until they're flat, and then baking them until they've got more crunch than your average baked potato. This is because smashing and separating your potatoes before you cook means that you have more available surface area which can be cooked. You don't need to boil them first (although boiling is pretty common in smashed potato recipes), but baking a flattened potato gets you a larger, thicker outside and a much smaller soft inside, sort of like a round and crunchy french fry.

When you're cooking your potatoes, your goal is to get as much starch directly in contact with the pan as you can muster without completely losing the potatoes' shape. The reason roasted potatoes become crispy in the first place is because of the starch inside them, and cooking a potato causes those starchy cells to swell up and push each other apart. By increasing the potatoes' surface area when you violently crush them, you're allowing direct heat to access the starch that's normally hidden beneath the skins. You can smash them with a potato masher or the palm of your hand, and you can toss them for a while to create a rougher surface.

Once you've possibly boiled and then flattened your potatoes, make sure they're dry before you put them in the oven, because foods with too much moisture don't crisp so easily. If you smash the right kind of potato — in this case, russet potatoes are starchy and they already have a fairly crispy exterior — then you'll get brittle results with a serious crunch once you're done.

When pairing crispy smashed potatoes with other foods, think of them as being similar to crispy potato wedges, or possibly even julienned hashbrowns. They can be easily seasoned with herbs like rosemary or thyme and then served as a dinner side dish alongside vegetables or meat. Alternatively, smashed breakfast potatoes are very much a possibility, and you can prepare them with the same pan you use for your breakfast eggs and bacon. You can even load up smashed potatoes with bacon bits, green onions, and sour cream just like a loaded baked potato. Potatoes are versatile.

There are other ways to make your crispy potatoes taste deep fried as well. Letting your taters soak in water with baking soda, also known as an alkaline bath, can help break down the outside of the potatoes and give you an even larger surface area to crisp. A quick trip to the air fryer can also be a good alternative to roasting, as the air fryer's dry heat is good for crisping. Still, you don't need an air fryer to get crispy potatoes; you just need your fist so you can flatten them into potato pancakes.