The Cottage Smallholder

Photo: Maris Piper potatoes

Danny has cut our potato bill from around £4 a week to 80p a week. Our cold dark barn is the perfect place to store spuds. He was horrified when he discovered how much that we were spending on potatoes. The price rose steeply last winter. The past warmer winters meant that most UK spuds were susceptible to blight – harvests were small and prices shot up.

Since then he has been looking out for marked down spuds in the supermarkets. Generally he finds them for 40p for 2.5 kilos. They are hung in the dark barn in thick Hessian sacks.

Perhaps this long bout of freezing weather in the UK might kill the blight spores this winter. Having decided not to try spuds again this year, I think that I’ll give them a final go this summer. There’s nothing like a home grown spud, transformed in home harvested goose fat to a plump crispy roast potato on a Sunday evening.

Danny likes to eat supper early. If he’s away I never eat before nine. Last night I was held up in Cambridge – Danny was cooking so I telephoned to warn of the delay. When I opened the cottage door his neck was stiff.
“We (you) forgot to buy oven chips. So we’ll have to wait 45 minutes for these to cook.”

My heart sank. We don’t eat a lot of chips but we enjoy them when we do. Oven ready chips are one of our regular convenience foods as I’m not wildly keen on our homemade oven chips.
“Why don’t we (you) try Sam’s method and par boil the chips. Then they only take 20 minutes in the oven.” D said he had already started the Sam method.

He interpreted Sam’s recipe and came up with these. They were wonderful – soft and fluffy inside and crisp outside.

And even better – they used less fat than the McCain’s only 5 percent fat chips and tasted scrummier than their best selling Home Fries.

In fact these homemade chips were so good that D pushed back his chair and carefully scrubbed chips off the shopping list. Thank you Sam.

Sam’s perfect oven chips. Best homemade oven chips recipe (for 2-3 hungry people)

Ingredients:

• 800 g of potatoes
• 5 tblsp of olive oil (approx 30ml/30g)
• Quarter tsp of garlic granules
• Pinch of cayenne pepper
• Large pinch of salt
• A good few twists of ground black pepper

Method:

Set the oven for 210c/190c fan

1. Peel the spuds and halve them. Add to a pan of boiling water (salted) bring the pan up to simmering point and leave the halves to simmer for five minutes. Drain and let them cool for 5 minutes or so.
2. Meanwhile, pour the oil, cayenne, salt and pepper into a big bowl and mix well.
3. Cut the potatoes carefully into chunky chips. Toss these in the seasoned oil and spread over a large baking tray. You may have to toss in one half at a time. We have a perforated chip and pizza pan very like this one CASA NON STICK PIZZA CHIP CRISPER and I reckon that it helps to make perfect chips and roast potatoes.
4. Bake them for 20 minutes 210c/190c fan and then ramp up the temperature for 10 minutes at 240c/220c fan, IMPORTANT – check them every 3 minutes as you want the outside to be crisp not burnt.

Danny also explained that these oven chips can be baked at a lower temperature for longer if you have another dish in the oven (say 180c/160c fan), as long as you ramp up the temperature for a good ten minutes at the end.

He says getting the perfect chip is more of an art than a science so you may need to practice to get your chips spot on because oven temperatures vary widely. Our best homemade oven chips so far were made with Maris Piper potatoes.