The Best Garlic Roasted Potatoes

Let me tell you something. We're doing potatoes today. Not just any potatoes — the BEST garlic roasted potatoes in the history of garlic roasted potatoes. The Irish had them, the French had them, the Germans had them and theirs were merely OK, I said it, somebody had to — and these potatoes I'm about to give you, mine, beat every single one of them. It's not even close. It's a slaughter on a sheet pan.

Many people don't know this — but the humble potato is the SECOND most consumed food on planet Earth. Second. After rice. And look, rice is doing fine, no shade, rice keeps its head down — but the potato CARRIES this world. We have been leaning on the potato for hundreds of years and we treat it like a sidekick. Like a backup dancer behind the steak. The potato is the star. The potato has always been the star. Scientists — and I've talked to scientists about this, smart people, the smartest, a guy with a PhD in food chemistry once took 90 minutes to explain the Maillard reaction to me and at the end of it I cried — they will tell you that the surface chemistry of a properly roasted potato is one of the most beautiful things human cooking has ever produced. Not my words. SCIENCE.

The secret comes in two parts. Part one: PARBOIL. You boil the potatoes for ten minutes before they ever see the oven, then you shake them hard in the colander to rough up the edges, and those roughed-up edges become the crispiest crispy potato edges this country has ever assembled. Part two: garlic goes in LATE. You add garlic at the start and put it in a 450 oven, you have made charcoal, you've ruined dinner, your guests are leaving. Late garlic wins. Always late garlic. That's the whole game. Plain and simple.

These potatoes are the side dish that becomes the main dish. Forget the chicken. Forget the steak. The potatoes are the star. The potatoes were ALWAYS the star. Your dinner guests will fight over the last one — actual fighting, I once had to break up a potato dispute between two grown adults and I was glad, glad, glad, because that's the energy you want at a dinner — and you'll just stand there smiling because YOU made these. You did. With your two hands. And my recipe. Mostly my recipe. That's the recipe.