New York · Side
Syracuse Salt Potatoes
- Easy
- 35 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, fresh herbs arguing happily on top.
Ingredients
- 1.5kg small new potatoes, unpeeled
- 350g kosher salt
- 2L water
- 170g butter, melted
- Chives or parsley
The skills inside
Allergen screen
Found: dairy
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Scrub the potatoes but leave them whole and unpeeled.
- Dissolve the salt in the water: it should be a genuine brine, cloudy and heavy.
- Boil the potatoes in the brine 20-25 min until tender to a knife. 25 min
- Drain and let them sit a minute; a fine white salt crust will bloom on the skins as they dry.
- Serve in a bowl of melted butter with herbs.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Brining & curing 88 recipes
- Fully committed either way: in a wet brine nothing floats clear of the liquid, and in a dry cure every face carries salt, seams and cavities included.
- The time was measured against the weight and the thickness rather than the recipe’s convenience, and it stayed cold for all of it.
- The change is visible and can be felt: the flesh is firmer than raw and its colour has deepened or gone more translucent, rather than still being slack and pale.
- Rinsed and dried as the recipe asks, and anything meant to crisp afterwards has a surface dry and tacky to the touch before it goes near heat.
- Cooked and tasted, it is seasoned right through to the centre rather than merely salty at the surface, and not so salty that the dish cannot be eaten.
Where it goes wrong It sat in the brine well past its time because a few extra hours seemed harmless; the surface is over-salted and the texture has gone from firm to spongy and wet, and no cooking takes salt back out.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Sauvignon Blanc (Sancerre)
- Also Right
- Grüner Veltliner
- From the Taps
- Berliner weisse
- Zero-Proof
- Cucumber-lime water
Green plates want green wines: vinaigrette’s acid meets its match, and the difficult vegetables surrender to Grüner.
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