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Roast Potatoes

Roast potatoes are potatoes roasted over coals with butter and coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,456 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Roast Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fire

  1. Prepare a fire until the coals are red hot.

  2. Cover the coals with hot ashes.

  3. Place the potatoes on the ashes.

  4. Cover the potatoes with more ashes and red-hot coals.

Roast and serve

  1. Let them roast for 25 minutes.

  2. Remove the potatoes, wipe them clean, and crush them open.

  3. Add a small amount of butter and sprinkle with salt.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Dense starch that softens into a fluffy interior as it cooks in the heat.
Butter
Adds fat that melts into the hot flesh, carrying flavor and moisture.

The step that matters

Cover the potatoes with more ashes and red-hot coals. Potatoes cook through only when heat surrounds them evenly. Ashes and coals on all sides deliver steady heat to the core. If the covering is thin or cool, the centers can stay firm while the skins char.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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