Regular baked spuds are good. Hasselback potatoes are awesome! Soft on the inside and crispy on the outside, basted with garlic rosemary olive oil. This is roast potato perfection!
Freshly cooked Hasselback potatoes
Hasselback potatoes talk
Everybody talks about how tips and tricks to avoid accidentally cutting the way through (easy – chopsticks or spatula on either side of the potato!). Why doesn’t anyone talk about the other things that matter for hasselback success?? Namely:
Fanning is key! For good hasselback potatoes, you need the slices to fan out as they bake so you can drip salty oil/fat between the slices and crispy edges. Without fanning, you end up with regular old roast spuds!
For fanning, you need thin slices (2mm is ideal), to cut down far enough (1cm / 0.4″ from base) and oval shaped potatoes work better than round ones. If you don’t cut down far enough, you will not get fanning! And thick slices don’t fan as well as thin slices (you can see in my photos the thin ones fan out more).
Basting is also key. Baste, baste, baste to encourage fanning (dragging the brush across the surface helps separate the slices) and to drip tasty salted oil between the potato slices.
And with that, let’s get onto what you want to know – how to make great hasselback potatoes!
Overhead photo of Hasselback potatoes
What you need
You really only need potatoes, oil and salt to make hasselback potatoes. Garlic and rosemary are optional, but they do infuse the oil with lovely flavour that gets brushed onto the potato.
Hasselback potatoes ingredients
Potato type – All-rounder and floury / starchy potatoes are best. The most common potatoes at regular stores will be fine – they’re stocked because they’re great all-rounders.
Australia – Sebago (the dirt brushed potatoes sold everywhere) are perfect, Desiree are great too. US: Yukon Gold, russet, UK: Maris piper, King Edward.
Waxy potatoes do work, but the cut surface gets kind of slippery which doesn’t really appeal to me.
Potato size and shape – Look for potatoes around 250g/8oz that are a nice even oval shape rather than round. These will fan out better to allow the oil and salt to drip between the slices.
If the potatoes are too small (like baby potatoes) then the inside will get too soft before the edges crisp up. And while in theory, you can make much larger ones, it will be a little harder to get the inside cooked without the edges of the thin slices burning.
Garlic and rosemary are optional. These infuse the oil with a little flavour which is then brushed onto the potatoes. But the flavour is subtle.
Olive oil – You can make hasselback potatoes with any fat, though oils will make the potatoes crisper than butter (because butter contains ~20% water). So if you do want to use some melted butter for brushing, I’d recommend still using olive oil for most of the baking time then use butter towards the end.
