This Is The Secret For Crispy, Restaurant-Quality Roast Potatoes

It's easy to botch a batch of roasted potatoes because so many things can go wrong. They can easily end up hard and chalky on the inside with a mushy outer layer nobody wants. On the flip side, it's easy to overcook roasted potatoes, leading to a bowl full of unpleasant hard squares or wedges with charred edges. Sometimes a batch goes so wrong that you can't even save them with salt and butter. And while there are several steps you can take to help you make restaurant-quality roasties, like choosing the right kind of potato for the job, there's one simple secret to making the best version of this staple dish, and it only requires water.

This little trick is widely used by restaurant chefs and not all that closely guarded. It's how celebrity chef Anne Burrell gets perfectly crispy breakfast potatoes and it's also the key to making air-fried potatoes taste deep-fried, a way to get the crispiest golden edges and an interior that is tender, flaky and not at all undercooked. All you have to do is boil your potatoes beforehand. In other words, cook your potatoes twice to get a batch of high-quality roasties that'll leave you wondering if you should start charging people for your spuds.

If you're aiming for crispy roast potatoes, boil them before roasting. The technique is known as parboiling and it's a game changer. After peeling them, you cut the potatoes into even chunks and boil them in salt water. It makes them tender in the center, cutting down on overall roasting time, but it'll also draw the starches in the potato to the edges. This concentration of starches will crisp up as they're roasting and create a crunchy outer layer on each and every potato. For best results, boil your cut spuds for five to seven minutes, until the edges are soft but the inside is still a bit tough. Only then should you toss the potatoes in oil and seasonings and roast them as usual. If you have baking soda in your pantry, adding a few pinches to the water will help express even more starches for maximum crunch.

Parboiling preps potatoes to achieve restaurant-quality crispness when they're roasted, but it's also a time saver that can help speed up a batch of roasties in a pinch. You can also parboil your potatoes a day ahead of roasting, to cut down on prep time the day of roasting. Just be sure to keep them in the refrigerator until your parboiled potatoes are ready for roasting.