Herby Crispy Potatoes With Cavolo Nero Chimichurri

Crispy potatoes with cavolo nero and spinach chimichurri, yoghurt and chilli. This is SUCH a good combination. This time of year, cavolo nero and spinach are two of my hero ingredients, I love them so much. And this is one of my favourite ways of serving them.

They are affordable, healthy and by eating vegetables that are in season, you make your life so much easier as a cook, as there’s less you need to do, to make them taste incredible.

A note on ingredients:

Baby new potatoes - the cutest of potatoes, small and round with a fine skin and waxy texture. They keep their shape once cooked and cut so you have less chance of a smashed potato rather than a roasted one! There is of course at time for a smashed potato or a potato with fluffed edges such as with more typical roast potatoes but here, baby potatoes get you a crisp exterior with good shape.

Olive oil - fat is so important to gain any sort of crispiness on food, so the olive oil is a key part of this recipe. Since we are roasting the potatoes, and thus heating the oil, there's no point using your finest extra virgin olive oil as the heat will alter the fresh flavour of it. Use regular olive oil (it's cheaper anyway!) and it'll do the job perfectly. Save your good stuff for finishing dishes and salads.

Chives - they give a fresh allium flavour, a mellow onion flavour essentially, without any of the raw sharpness an onion can give. They also look beautiful and add a lovely pop of green to your dish.

Lime - if you think of the four main factors that go into cooking, we have: salt, fat, acid, heat. If you haven't read Samin Nosrat's incredible cookbook on this or watched her Netflix series, we couldn't recommend it enough. I digress. This dish has salt, fat (olive oil), heat (roasting the potatoes) but missing some acid! Enter lime. Lime is a citrus fruit, its juice is acidic and this adds brightness to the dish and also rounds it out. Often, when cooking at home, if you find your food tastes a little bit flat, try adding a splash of acid e.g. vinegars, citrus, wine etc and it will transform the dish!

Cavolo Nero -  a type of Italian cabbage, it’s such a dark green it’s almost black – hence the name “nero” which means black in Italian. It is full of goodness: vitamins A, C, K and full of good fibre. If you can’t find it, curly kale should work similarly, especially when paired with the spinach as the recipe states.

Some questions we get asked a lot!

Should you boil potatoes before roasting them?

In some recipes, it may not require you parboil them. And this is understandable as in theory, you don't need to parboil as potatoes will eventually cook in the oven. What parboiling does do is often the potato insides before the roasting begins, so you won't risk burning the outsides and end up with still a hard centre. Moreover, parboiling is a key stage to get your potatoes seasoned. The water should be HEAVILY seasoned with salt for parboiling as this is the only chance you have to season the inside of the potato as the potato absorbs water.

Why won't my potatoes crisp in the oven?

Sometimes oven temperature can have an effect here. In this recipe, we suggest roasting at 220c which should be plenty hot enough to crisp them up. It can help to steam dry the potatoes once they are parboiled. This means draining them and sitting them in the sieve over the pan or in the sink to have some of the steam evaporate. This means a less wet potato and a crisper exterior of the potato. Finally, if you struggle with getting them crispy, try laying the potatoes in one layer on the baking tray to avoid overcrowding.