Making Christmas dinner is no mean feat, so it can be handy to utilise cooking hacks to make it easier and one of the best tricks is to use an air fryer for your roast potatoes.

The kitchen gadget has been having a moment of late, and it seems you can put just about anything in there and it’ll taste great. But if you only use it for one thing this Christmas, a chef recommends it for making the crispiest roast potatoes.

Poppy O’Toole, who is known on social media as ‘the potato queen’, has spoken to Metro.co.uk about her favourite carb and shared her top tips for cooking in an air fryer.

Her biggest tip is not to overfill your air fryer with potatoes and to ensure you coat them in a spray of oil, or some other kind of fat.

She said: ‘Air fryers use hot air circulation to cook food but if it’s all layered and squashed together, you’ll be left with undercooked and steamed food, which is not ideal if you’re after a batch of golden and crispy potatoes.

‘Another piece of advice is to re-evaluate cooking times, the air fryer is an incredibly energy efficient piece of kitchen equipment that reduces cooking times. It will normally come with a handy table of cooking times and temperatures for common foods but check online if you are unsure. You don’t want you to accidentally burn your festive feasts!’

The expert, who has recently published an air fryer cookbook, continued to say: ‘It’s really useful to coat whatever you’re cooking (be it meat, veg etc) in a spray of oil or some sort of fat so it cooks more evenly and gives you a better overall colour. Whilst cooking, it’s also important to give everything a toss mid-way through so you avoid any underdone bits!

‘And if you’re unsure about just how powerful your air fryer is, test out a simple recipe like homemade chips so you can gauge your timings and heat settings. Some air fryers are particularly ferocious and the recipes need adjusting slightly to avoid any burning!’

How to make deliciously crispy roast potatoes in the air fryer

In order to make Poppy’s golden and crispy roast potatoes (which serve 2-4 people), you’ll need just three ingredients and the whole process is broken down into four simple and speedy steps.

She claims the key to the best roastie is to ensure you’re using the ‘right’ potato, which needs to be a ‘starchy’ one, such as a Maris Piper. This is because they’re going to ‘give the most punch and the most fluffiness in the middle’.

The chef also urges you to think carefully about how you cut up your potatoes when preparing them, as the more edges you have on them, the crispier they will become as they cook.

Ingredients:

 4 Maris Piper, Russet or red skin potatoes, peeled and cut into quarters

2 tablespoons of vegetable oil

1 teaspoon of fine salt

Instructions:

Heat the air fryer to 160ºC/325ºF

In a mixing bowl, toss the potatoes in the oil and salt, and tip them into the air fryer basket.

Cook for 30 minutes, giving them a proper aggressive toss every 10 minutes, and even poke them with a fork if you want to fluff up the insides further.

Increase the heat to 200ºC/400ºF and cook for a further 6 minutes, until golden and crispy.

Source:
courtesy of METRO

by Courtney Pochin

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