>Aunt Trisha’s Smashed Potatoes

>These are truly a treat.  I am not sure where my Aunt Trisha got the recipe from, or if she devised these herself, but they are a keeper!

You will need time when you make this recipe… allow for an hour or so.

Ingredients:
Yukon gold baby potatoes (or baby potatoes of other sorts, I know fingerlings also work well)
Coarse salt
Olive oil (Aunt Trisha uses peanut or canola oil because they have a higher burning point than olive oil, but I used plain old olive oil and they turned out fine)

Preparation:

1. Scrub clean baby potatoes, submerge in pot of water and heat over medium/high flame.  Basically, what you’re doing in this step is boiling the potatoes until they’re fork tender.  I didn’t time how long it took mine to get tender — I just kept checking.  My guess is something like 10 minutes?

2. Once they’re tender, remove the potatoes from water.  Place the potatoes on a sheet pan and let them cool slightly. (I lined my sheet pan with parchment paper, since I didn’t want a messy clean-up, and this only sorta worked for me…I still had to clean the baking sheet, but I guess it could have been worse.)

3. Once the potatoes are slightly cool, carve an X on the tops of each potato, slicing them about 1/2″ deep.  Then, with your fingers (or I guess my Aunt Trisha uses a spoon, probably to keep her fingers from burning on the hot potatoes), smash/pinch the potatoes together, so that the potatoes open up a little (see the picture above, difficult to explain in words).

4. Drizzle oil over the potatoes, making sure to put enough on so that the potatoes will get crispy, but not too much to drown them.  Then sprinkle coarse salt over the potatoes and place in an oven heated to 425 degrees for 45 or so minutes.

The potatoes will come out soft, but crunchy!  Like a mixture between french fries and baked potatoes!