Potato Party!

Plus, a superstar recipe for wrinkled potatoes.

Hasselback potatoes.

My partner Dominique wanted one thing for his birthday: a potato party. The idea was that there would be a “power hour” of sorts — except instead of taking a shot of beer every minute, we would sample a different potato dish every hour. I guess that’s not so much a power hour as it is a power afternoon, but the spirit of scheduled consumption remained. And ultimately who cares about the time table? This was the perfect excuse to celebrate the humble tuber in many of its forms.

The original plan of attack:

1. Hasselback potatoes

2. Smashed potatoes

3. Wrinkled potatoes

4. Tater tots with date butter

5. Sweet potato waffle fries

6. Classic French fries

7. Sweet potato casserole

Truthfully, this roadmap barely scratches the potato surface. Major omissions include but are not limited to gnocchi, mashed potatoes, baked potatoes, latkes, and various soups and stews. But, given that we couldn’t truly encompass the wide world of tubers, this was a decent start.

Unfortunately not every dish on the agenda came to fruition (RIP sweet potato casserole and smashed potato plans), and some, like the fries, were merely air fryer fever dreams barely worthy of commentary. But as for the rest? Let’s talk about it.

Hasselback Potatoes

In lieu of much beloved baked potatoes, I decided to roast some Hasselbacks. This may seem like a wildly egregious choice, but I was motivated by logistics, with my reasoning being that it’s easier for a group of people to pick away at the segments of a Hasselback potato than it is to fork at baked potato flesh. Plus, here’s my hot take: Hasselback potatoes taste better than baked potatoes, and they’re just inherently more fun.

For those who may be unaware, the Hasselback potato was invented at Stockholm’s Hotel Hasselbacken in 1953 and soon after took over the world. It’s essentially a Russet potato thinly sliced most of the way through but kept intact by a bottom layer of flesh. When it roasts, the Hasselback potato fans open, allowing its slices to both crisp up and turn creamy. This results in a potato dish that is visually arresting and texturally fascinating. And, if seasoned properly, delicious too.

Coincidentally, Dom and I spent a few days at the Hotel Hasselbacken last year, but somehow never tried its famous namesake potato while there — a missed opportunity in gaining some serious potato cred.

There are many recipes for Hasselback potatoes, but the first one I ever attempted came from Chrissy Tiegen, of all people, and I’ve stuck with it ever since. Her straightforward Hasselback potato recipe has us slathering melted butter, olive oil, thyme, salt and pepper across the potato and roasting it for an hour at 400°, applying further bastings midway through. It’s an imprecise science, and what I’ve learned over the years is that these potatoes can sometimes take longer than an hour and can (and should) receive multiple bastings towards the end of the cooking time.

So, how do I know that the potatoes are done? I don’t always. But I look for crinkly skins, floppy segments, and some yellowing inside. If after an hour the potatoes aren’t ready, I give a bonus baste and let them go another 15.

Speaking of basting, don’t overdo it with your oil and butter at the top of the bake. Those potato slices will be stiff, and forcing the oil and butter to slide into the crevasses is annoying work. Most of the liquid will run off the potato and into the pan anyway. Just give a perfunctory baste so the outside stays lubricated.

Later, as the slices fan out, that’s when you can really go to town with the oil and butter, not to mention the all-important seasoning. Oh, and don’t forget to add vital finishing salt to the Hasselbacks when they’re done. It not only looks sophisticated but often gives that last boost of flavor to help the spuds cross the finish line.

Wrinkled Potatoes

Cocktail umbrella optional.

A neat trick to have in your hors d’oeuvres quiver are these salted potatoes. A friend served them at an Oscars viewing party many years ago, and now they are part of my repertoire, surfacing every few months as an easy and delicious standby whenever I host people.

Hailing originally from José Andrés and later published on Martha Stewart’s website, this dish feels at times more like a chemistry experiment than a recipe. Little baby potatoes are added to a saucepan and then topped with just enough water to cover them. Then the fun part: add enough salt so the potatoes float. We’re not talking about tablespoons here. This is a tilt-the-box-and-let-her-rip situation.

The potatoes bubble away for 30 minutes, and after some draining and shaking and wrapping in towels, the skins wrinkle and become encrusted in salt crystals. The resulting bites are impossibly creamy with the deeply satisfying pop of a taut membrane giving way with each bite. You’d think with all the salt that these potatoes would be inedible, but somehow it just works. Salty - yes. But almost perfectly so. The salt really takes center stage here as not just a seasoning but a flavor.

I’ve made this dish countless times; so of course it’s the potato party where I mess it up at long last. When the potatoes were done cooking and cooling, I was suspicious of a small puddle at the bottom of the pan. Maybe the spuds needed more cooking? I returned the pan to the heat and evaporated away the remaining moisture. This seemed logical, but for the first time ever, the wrinkled potatoes had in fact crossed the threshold into “too salty.” My recommendation: if you make this and see some moisture after the potatoes have cooled, just drain it away. Don’t boil anything off. Something about the second boil messed up the chemistry and allowed too much salt to cling onto the potatoes. Luckily, a swiftly improvised aioli of mayo, garlic, and chipotle powder helped tame the salt issue.

That being said, no one seemed particularly perturbed. The wrinkled potatoes were the fastest item to disappear all afternoon.

The original recipe no longer seems to live on Martha’s website. Let it live on eternally here:

Wrinkled Potatoes by José Andrés

Ingredients

• 2 lbs baby potatoes (nothing too big - maybe the size of a large grape or cherry)

• 1 cup salt, plus more as needed (you’ll need more)

The Steps:

1. Place the potatoes in a deep, medium-size pot. Add enough water to cover, and salt. Potatoes should float in the salted water; if not, add more salt.

2. Place pot over high heat and bring to a boil. Immediately reduce heat to a simmer and cook until potatoes are easily pierced with the tip of paring knife, 25 to 30 minutes.

3. Drain water from pot, leaving just enough to cover the bottom. Return pot to low heat and cook, shaking pot until the salt covering the potatoes begins to crystallize, about 5 minutes. Remove from heat and cover pot with a clean kitchen towel until potato skins have wrinkled, about 10 minutes. Serve immediately with dipping sauces, as desired.

Tater Tots with Hot Date! Butter

I recently purchased Rawaan Alkhatib’s date-focused cookbook Hot Date! and one of the first recipes to jump out at me was this one, which has us tossing tater tots with a compound butter of dates, garlic, parmesan, herbs, and other tasty things. A potato party seemed like the perfect time to test drive this dish.

I can authoritatively say that this sweet and savory potato silliness was indeed a massive hit. I enjoyed it, but I also felt like it could have been even better had I chosen a better brand of tater tot. Not all tots are created equal, it turns out! Also, at this point in the day, I think I had digested enough salt to blow out my tastebuds; so nothing tasted quite right anymore. Either way, there were many wide eyes and guttural moans due to this dish. It will certainly go in the party rotation. Alas, forgot to take a pic of it. Next time!

Bonus dips!

If there’s a party, I’m always going to try a new dip. A sane person will make one; an ambitious person will make two; and a slightly deranged person who has to cook several courses of potatoes will make three dips. I’m clearly the latter.

First, I had a vision of crudités, as one does; so, I went with Amy Thielen’s “Reformed Dill Dip” from her critically acclaimed book Company. I’m not sure what makes this dish reformed, but I’ll just assume that at one point it had a violent temperament.

Either way, the dip brings together sour cream, yogurt, garlic, dill, chives, cheddar, lemon, and horseradish, and the result is a very good version of the creamy white stuff that sits in the center of a supermarket veggie tray. People really enjoyed this dip, and I found it paired especially well with slices of jicama. Shout out to our friend Carly who sliced vegetables into a wildly impressive crudité spread.

I only have one minor note. With a food processor this dip should take only about five minutes to whip up. However, the instructions call for much manual herb chopping, which is fun but also maybe not the most necessary. Next time, I’m heading straight for the Breville. Moving on…

Dip #2 was just a green sauce I improvised: heaps of basil, some parsley, pistachios, nutritional yeast, miso, and rice vinegar. It tasted mostly like a pesto, but also like a wholly independent green sauce thing. The split identity worked for the dip, which paired nicely with the crudités, crackers, and also the wrinkled salt potatoes later on.

But the most talked-about dip — the one that caught each and every person by surprise - was the roasted garlic sunflower seed dip. Chef-turned-TikTok-star Hailee Catalano just released her first cookbook, By Heart, and I’ve been eager to dive into it. Her garlic sunflower seed dip caught my eye for both its striking appearance and its impossible to imagine flavor. Sunflower seeds? Honey? Garlic? Dill?

Essentially we soak a bunch of sunflower seeds while three heads of garlic roast away, ultimately blending everything into a frothy, hummus-like consistency. There’s also lemon and honey and olive oil in play, but the real headline here are the sunflower seeds.

Soaked, plumped and whipped, the seeds lend a nutty flavor to the dip in a way that I haven’t experienced before. It all felt slightly alien to me, but fun alien, not scary alien. What I’m trying to say is Hailee Catalano’s roasted garlic sunflower seed dip is the veritable ALF of dips.

The recipe also calls for a simple garlic paprika oil that must be fried and then drizzled over the dip. I almost skipped this section out of laziness, but in the back of my head I knew this dish was destined for Substack coverage; so might as well see it through. Glad I did. Without the oil, the dip was fascinating, tasty, weird, but maybe not a home run. The paprika oil added some sort of balance or X-Factor that brought all the disparate elements together.

What emerged was a dip that people were genuinely obsessed with. There were many exclamations, mainly because everyone assumed they were dipping into hummus and instead were tasting something vastly different. A switcheroo is fun, and nothing excites a guest like some misdirection (unless, of course, it leads to an EpiPen).

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Clearly there will be a sequel to this potato party. There are too many potatoes to try, to cook, to enjoy. Plus, I still have roasted sweet potatoes in the fridge, waiting to be put into a casserole. What are your favorite potato recipes? Now accepting suggestions for the next potato bonanza.

Helpful links:

Hasselback potatoes by Chrissy Tiegen

Tater Tots Tossed in Date Butter by Rawaan Alkhatib

Hailee Catalano on TikTok