Adding ‘weird’ ingredient will make roast potatoes ‘fluffy’, says chef

A Michelin-trained chef has shared her “secret ingredient” to making “fluffy” and “crispy” roast potatoes.

Poppy O’Toole, 31, is a best-selling cookbook author and self-proclaimed “potato queen.” Poppy took to her TikTok page to share a new recipe to her 4.8 million followers.

In the recent clip, Poppy said she’d recently heard of a recipe that included adding clotted cream to your roast potatoes – and decided to give it a try. While initially apprehensive, she tried the recipe anyway.

She said: “I have made a lot of roast potato recipes in my time and this is one of the weirdest ones. I just don’t know how I feel about it. I do love me a clotted cream, though.”

Poppy walked viewers through the initial steps of the recipe, which includes peeling and chopping your potatoes into (roughly) quarters, depending on their size.

Poppy then added the pototoes into a pan of “cold, heavily salted water.” The chef claims this is “key when you’re cooking anything from the ground.”

Next, Poppy said that when the potatoes are “fork tender” – they fall off the end of the fork/knife – they need to be drained. She added that a “crucial” step she takes is to steam dry the potatoes.

She does this by sitting to colander full of potatoes inside/on top of the pan used to boil them, then add a clean tea towel over the top. Poppy recommends leaving them like this for around 5 – 10 minutes.

The chef said that when the potatoes show a white film around the edge, they can be added back into the pan. She said: “So whilst they’re still hot, get them back into the pan. These are proper fluffy and crumbly.”

Then, on to the most unusual step. Poppy said the “secret ingredient” is to add half a tub of clotted cream, adding that the recipe is “wild.”

She recommends letting the clotted cream melt into the potatoes, adding a “sprinkle” of salt, and mixing it all together. When moving the potatoes on to your baking tray, Poppy says to split them up a bit since they may be stuck together after mixing.

After cooking, Poppy showed off the roast potatoes. She said: “They look good. You can see that the cream has caramelized…it’s gorgeous. Little bit of golden, looks crispy.”

She added: “Texturely, they’re very, very soft. So actually, the clotted cream seems to, like, melt in the mouth. You get a tiny bit of crisp and then it just melts.

“I think these would sit better on maybe like more of a summer roast dinner because I think if you add a heavy gravy onto this, it’s just gonna melt into nothing. They’re just like clouds of fluffy potato.”

Showing off the finished product, she added: “I’ve got to say, the caramelization you get on these is phenomenal. Beautiful colour and a super glisten crispiness.”