Crispy Smashed Baby Potatoes

These crispy smashed baby potatoes are a great alternative to french fries and tater tots because of their small size and crispy exterior. Kids love the size, parents love that they don’t need to be fried in oil. They also don’t include a long list of unpronounceable ingredients like you get on a bag of frozen potato products.

In the summertime, I like to to do something similar on the grill where I’ll grill potatoes and get them nice and crispy on the outside. In both cases, the secret to the fluffy interior and crispy interior is a two-step cooking process.

Making Crispy Smashed Baby Potatoes

You’ll start with a 1.5 pound bag (pretty common in supermarkets) of baby potatoes. Gold, purple, red, doesn’t really matter. Though here I’m using golden baby potatoes. Many would say that they tend to be the fluffiest when cooked.

The first step is to boil them in a pot of water for about 15 minutes until they pierce easily with a knife. An alternate approach if you are short on time is to microwave them for about 5 minutes.

Next, to turn an ordinary boiled baby potato into a crispy smashed baby potato, you’ll need to coat the outside with an oil to raise the surface temperature. To do this I make a flavorful herbed oil that consists of olive oil, garlic, parsley and rosemary. You’ll use this oil to toss the potatoes after they are boiled and before the second cooking step.

Next you’ll lightly smash each of the potatoes with a fork and flatten them out. The ideal way to cook these is with high heat on a large griddle. A skillet would work just as well, but you’ll only be able to do so many of them at a time. To keep from having to cook 5 or 6 batches of baby potatoes, it’s best to finish them in the oven.

When the herb oil coated potatoes in your bowl have cooled enough to handle, transfer them to a sheet pan and mash each of them out. You can see from the picture above how they will look before and after. Halfway through you’ll want to carefully flip each one over.

After they are done, you can pile them up on a plate and top with the rest of the herb oil. It’s a pretty simple side dish that packs a lot of flavor.