Roast potatoes

I've recently (over the last several months) been reading Harold McGee's McGee on Food and Cooking: An Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture, one of the benchmark books for "molecular gastronomy" and fortunately I'd reached the section on potatoes a few days before Christmas. Armed with some new science I attempted Christmas day's roast potatoes a new way.

McGee mentions that cooking the potatoes in water at less than 100 degrees C, around 70C, allows the potato to retain its shape whilst cooking to a more even texture. It takes longer, but you don't risk potatoes that are falling apart on the outside when the middle is cooked. So instead of the normal par boiling of the roasties, I held them at 70C for around 20 minutes and then transferred them to the oven.

The result? At first taste, they almost tasted like canteen, mass cooked roast potatoes, but after a few seconds they seemed to taste vastly better. A consistent creaminess to the texture, lacking in the slight graininess that potatoes can sometimes have. Perhaps the main disappointment was that the outer crispy roast layer wasn't quite right. This is probably due to the very thing this method avoids, i.e. the breaking up of the outside of the potato, which gives a fluffy surface for the roasting.

So an interesting experiment that has some use. It might need some adaptation to improve the outer crispiness, but it's definitely worth following up. Only trouble is, now I want a temperature controlled water bath to experiment with...