Salt Roasted Potatoes -- how to do it

I wrote about the salt roasted potatoes we had in Honolulu, but realized that pictures would go a long way toward showing how easy these potatoes are to make. Since Kent made the salt roasted potatoes again Sunday night, we got pictures all the way through the process.

Here we go!

We used a total of 10 small red potatoes, with five in each baking dish. We also use kosher salt because of the texture. I've read other recipes that use a mixture of rock salt and kosher salt and we'll give that a try. I don't think that normal salt would work as well since the salt would bake to solid rock-like consistency. If you try it with table salt, let me know how it goes.

This picture is one we'd have found very helpful when trying to make these potatoes for the first time. These salt roasted recipes don't really say how much water to use, or salt either for that matter. Well -- use  enough salt to cover the potatoes entirely; moisten the salt with water to form a thick paste. You don't want it to be runny, just sort of sticky.

Cover the potatoes with your salt mixture and bake at 400°F for about 30 minutes.

And this is the other picture we'd have liked to see. The salt bakes into a hard crust, and you have to break it to get your food out. See the indentations left in the salt? Once you get your food out, just brush off the excess salt if you have any. Bonus: clean up is a breeze -- rinse out your dish and you're done.

Now you get to enjoy these amazing potatoes! I know they don't look like anything, but they are incredibly good. Best of all, even I -- a butter fiend when it comes to potatoes -- didn't miss or even want butter. They don't need salt or pepper either. They are that good.

You say potato

Normally, I'd put a post like this on my son's food blog but he's got strict rules about including a picture of the food plated and ready to eat. We neglected to take that picture so instead, I'll just post about this recipe here.

When we were in Honolulu, we had dinner at Morimoto's (which I am only just now realizing I never wrote about). I had some salt-roasted fingerling potatoes that were incredibly tender and flavorful and had zero fat.

I love potatoes but tend to drown them in butter so I was intrigued by these salt-roasted potatoes. A quick Google search turned up several recipes so I got some boxes of kosher salt, a bag of fingerling potatoes and Tuesday evening, Kent made a batch.

He used an entire box of salt to cover the potatoes in this baking dish, and sprinkled water on top and stirred the salt until it made a gritty paste. He baked them at 400F for about 30 minutes and let them cool while I did the salmon.

I wish I'd taken a picture of him getting the potatoes out of the pan because the salt was a solid block and had picked up some of the purple color of the two purple potatoes in the mix. I'll do that next time maybe.

Our version of the potatoes were as good as those I'd had in Honolulu. We've found a lot of other salt roasting recipes so I am pretty sure we aren't done buying lots of boxes of salt.