Salt Roasted Potatoes

When we were in Honolulu, we had dinner at Morimoto's, which is a restaurant owned by an Iron Chef. I had some salt-roasted fingerling potatoes with my dinner 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 Kent made a batch.

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.

Ingredients:

10 small red potatoes
Kosher salt

Directions:

• Preheat the oven to 400° F
• Place the potatoes in a baking dish or two (we generally use two small baking dishes)
• (Here's where things get less precise) Using 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.
• Let cool a bit before you start cracking the salt crust
• Break the crust and carefully extract the potatoes
• Brush off any excess salt and serve immediately

Sticky, not runny

Cracking the crust