So good that you’ll eat them with a spoon.
The potato is the reigning champ of all the tubers for the unmatched pleasure and versatility it brings to the table. The potato’s experience is superior in any form, but candy bowl potatoes have traditionally been traded for gold and were the reason for dozens of peace treaties probably. Every person for whom I make my world-famous candy bowl potatoes swoons at the kitchen door asking for more but it’s never enough—the potatoes I mean; I never make enough. They take so long.
Ingredients
- onion
- red potatoes
- olive oil
- salt and pepper
Method
You will need to gather all the ingredients if you want to make this dish. This is great for breakfast or dinner, so it’s best to start by chopping an onion just in case you want to make an omelet, or maybe a quick beef wellington to go with these. It’s okay if candy bowl potatoes were an afterthought after you chopped the onion because you changed your mind about the beef wellington. Either way, when you’re done chopping an onion, grab the red potatoes, a knife, and a cutting board. I say red potatoes because those are the best taste for this dish due to their sweetness and thin skin.
As with everything involving me there is a specific process by which you attain perfection, although it’s never healthy to assume you will achieve perfection. Years ago, I became enamored with the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, the beauty in imperfection. Sometimes the only way I can move on from toiling over the details of a matter is by reminding myself of how we prize a patina for its beauty when really, it’s just oxidation gained from neglect—keep this in mind when proceeding with the candy bowl potatoes because the joy you receive from eating these will never be a permanent state of mind.
Brace the potato on the cutting board by holding it with your thumb and index finger. Notice how the convex properties of the potato’s surface are conducive to rolling; you need to create a flat side. One way to accomplish this would be to slice a half of a centimeter to one centimeter from the side and then make the same cut to the opposing side to create a potato that can lay flat on its top or bottom. But I promise you there is a better way. Slice the oblong potato right down the middle lengthwise and squeeze the two hemispheres together with your thumb and index finger as you remove the knife—a great metaphor for the shift to fiat from gold; it all falls apart without the constant pressure from outside forces.
Keep pressing your fingers on the sides of the potato and use your knife to make another slice exactly one centimeter next to the cut you just made in the center of little your red potato plateau. How cool would that be for a restaurant name—The Red Potato Plateau. I just now came up with that name while writing this, but I have always wanted to open my own restaurant; it’s been such a huge fantasy. I’ve got no culinary experience or business knowledge, so the odds are stacked against me, but I envision dreaming up the concept and appointing a head chef to ensure its properly executed so I don’t go out of business when someone orders onion rings.
Continue making slices in one-centimeter intervals from the middle to the edge, and when you’re done, make the same cuts from the middle to the other edge. Set the two convex edges to the side to reveal a sliced potato with two flat opposing sides. We have given the potato a definitive top and bottom, and it becomes possible to lay it flat on the cutting board and repeat the same slicing technique with one exception—now these intervals should only be a half of a centimeter. You will be cutting through several layers of potato, the number of which is directly dependent upon the number of slices you made from the middle to the edges, which is directly dependent upon the size of your potato. The reason you slice them from the middle to the edge, instead of linearly from one side to the other, is because you need to keep squeezing the outside so that the slices remain packed together as you make the cuts, otherwise the potatoes will slide around making it impossible to manage with any efficiency. This capital-T Truth will become more apparent as time progresses—just like the metaphor, probably.
You have effectively julienned the potatoes into strips which measure approximately one centimeter tall and one centimeter wide; you’re halfway to getting started. Leaving the sliced potato flat on the cutting board, rotate it 90° and dice the strips into one-centimeter pieces. Scoop them all into a bowl and cover them with water.
The popular idiom says that a picture is worth a thousand words—I love idioms, because they contain so much indescribable truth in a phrase that was designed by its unique culture over generations, to convey a complicated thought which could otherwise take hundreds of words to communicate—and therefore I say that I’ve provided you with an accurate picture of how to cut the potatoes for my scrumptious and desirable candy bowl potatoes. It’s a very specific method, I’m not claiming it is proprietary—the stinking French have certainly already cut potatoes in this fashion and have probably even assigned a fancy name to the technique—nevertheless, it is my method.
This is an opportunity to take a break, because if you leave the potatoes in the water, they’ll be fine. If you think you might walk away from this project for several hours, then you should keep the water-covered potatoes in the refrigerator.
When you feel ready to return to the kitchen, we must rinse the potatoes without unnecessarily dirtying up a strainer, like a child. It’s easiest to hold the bowl under the kitchen faucet as you gently run water into one side of the bowl while tilting the opposite side down, adjusting the angle so that none of the potato dices pour out into the sink; continuing this until the water runs clear.
Pour your rinsed potato dices onto a plate that’s lined with several paper towels and begin drying them off by rubbing and patting them with another paper towel. Give this step some due diligence because the dryer the potatoes, the better your outcome will be when you put them into the hot grease.
While the beauty of my quick 6-hour recipes is in the opportunity to pause, a chef with professional experience would have a more efficient strategy for time management in the kitchen, which is why it’s imperative that I hire one to help me run The Red Potato Plateau someday. I would just now be heating the oil and my customers out front would all be full of bread by now; that’s too many carbs which would ruin the dining experience.
Pour a thin layer of olive oil into your frying pan—preferably a cast iron pan if you can manage; you’re going to want something that’s non-stick. I have done this in a stainless-steel pan before, but that requires a lot of experience with making this dish lest you end up with hashbrowns, so, reader beware.
Dump all the diced potatoes into the frying pan when it’s at a low heat, because you don’t want to come in too hot; we’re not making French fries (for obvious reasons), so there’s no need to rush in with guns blazing, you beast. Take your time with it, you could be here as long as thirty minutes depending on how things go. Add some more olive oil as you stir the potatoes around, making sure all the dices are nicely coated. You may add more olive oil as needed to prevent the potatoes from sticking to the pan.
Continue to stir the potatoes and use the spatula to flip them over themselves nonstop. The more continuous motion you keep, the better your results will be. Do this while they cook on low for an indefinite amount of time. It is very important to heat the potatoes slowly to allow them to soften and soak in all the olive oil; it is also an opportunity to use a nice, robustly flavored olive oil, because we are not overheating it like in a deep-fry. When you grow tired of the constant pot stirring and potato flipping, let it simmer and do nothing before reconvening your attempt to crisp the potato from the bottom up—yet another brilliant metaphor for the population’s disposition towards media ever since the algorithm eroded societal trust through engagement-hacking that was driven by the never-ending, capitalistic endeavor to move the bottom line year-over-year by two growth points.
Eventually the potatoes will gain some color as they begin to clump together, and it will become easier to flip them over more like a pancake. However, you do not want them in the form of a pancake; flipping just helps you gauge how crispy they’ve become. You need to crisp the softened potatoes just enough without going too far—it’s okay to bump up the heat for these final few minutes—this is a precarious moment because you may feel like you are creating hash at this point, but just continue stirring and flipping until half of them become crispy enough that when dropped from the spatula sound like raw popcorn kernels falling into an empty stock pot. When you’ve achieved the correct texture, consistency, and auditorial characteristics with your potatoes, add some salt and pepper while you’re still mixing them in the pan before scooping them onto a paper towel-lined plate to dry, then serve them in a bowl with a spoon.
