Now that really is a posh potato
It takes 25 hours to prepare, has 29 ingredients and is the star dish of a top London restaurant’s £195 menu. But can you make it cheap-as-chips at home?
STEP aside scallops, move over filet mignon and leave that lobster. there’s a new gourmet dish on the menu — and it’s the last one you might expect. for the humble potato is the ingredient du jour among discerning chefs, who are elevating it from a mere side dish to centre stage.
At London’s Holborn Dining room, there are nightly queues for a slice of its sell- out potato dauphinoise pie, while diners rave about the potato buttermilk waffle at tom Kerridge’s restaurant, the Hand & flowers, in Marlow, Buckinghamshire.
To top it all, however, there’s the ultimate — and perhaps most ludicrous — spud-centric dish: the 25-hour Michelin-starred potato.
The centrepiece of the £195-a-head tasting menu at Core, the Notting Hill eatery run by Clare Smyth, the only British female chef to boast three Michelin stars, it’s essentially a glorified jacket potato, cooked slowly in a vacuum bag at a low temperature, marinated overnight and served with fish eggs, homemade crisps and a butter seaweed sauce. Critics have labelled it ‘ the world’s greatest potato’.
One salivating review on TripAdvisor declares: ‘the potato and roe was to die for. It was the one we could not stop raving about ... I had no idea a simple potato could taste that good.’
Having been born and raised, like Clare, in Northern Ireland, I, too, have a fondness for potatoes. Boiled, mashed, baked, roasted, fried — no meal in our house is complete without a portion of potatoes.
But serving one as a main course on a Michelin-starred menu? Even I’m struggling not to scoff. Clare, who trained under Gordon
Simple steps: Take a humble potato, cook it in a bag and fill it. Right, Sarah’s gourmet creation
ramsay and catered for prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding, says she wanted to put a familiar, everyday item on her menu.
‘I grew up eating potatoes every single day with every meal, being Irish,’ she explains. ‘So, later, when we were in kitchens making pomme puree [posh mash], I would eat a single boiled potato with salt and pepper on it before every service.
‘It was my head chef who said, “Do you realise we’ve got to do a potato dish?”
Clare describes her 25-hour potato, which requires two types of seaweed (dulse and kombu), vinegar powder, butterfly sorrel and wild rocket flowers, as ‘quite classic’.
‘It’s an extremely versatile vegetable that people love to eat,’ she says. ‘ people can sometimes be scared of fine dining and it can be intimidating. But when you put a dish like that down, it fills people with confidence to eat and enjoy it.’
With almost five million vegans and vegetarians in the UK, the shift towards meatfree comfort food couldn’t be more timely. Add to that the health benefits of potatoes — they’re low in calories (110 calories per medium baked potato), fat-free and rich in vitamins C and B6 — and it’s no wonder they’re culinary gold.
At a time when the cost of living is sky-high, there’s also the fact that potatoes are cheap as, well, chips. Charlotte potatoes cost 10p a spud.
So how much work goes into the world-famous 25-hour potato, and does it live up to the hype? I set about recreating it at home to find out.
SOURCING INGREDIENTS
MY FIRST task: tackling the ingredients list. And this is no simple supermarket shop — even Waitrose’s speciality aisle won’t cut it.
Clare’s recipe has 29 components, some of which — potatoes, butter, shallots, garlic, double cream — seem straightforward; others I have never even heard of.
I Google ‘salted kombu’ (a type of Japanese edible kelp) and track it down at a specialist cooks’ warehouse in tottenham, North London, along with some unappetising- sounding ‘seaweed bacon’.
These are both required to slowcook and marinate the potato, as well as being added to the butter sauce (or beurre blanc in chef lingo).
For the roe mix — trout eggs and smoked herring eggs, served on top of the potato — I trek to a fine food specialist in Covent Garden, where I also find edible flowers and three types of sorrel (a green plant from the rhubarb family).
The main event should be a medium- sized Charlotte potato, chosen for its thin, waxy skin and creamy flesh. there are also crisps made from ratte potatoes, which are small and nutty.
I’m afraid I cheat on both counts, instead using potatoes grown by my father-in-law. I choose a fist- sized potato for the centrepiece, and a small, knobbly one for the crisps.
GRAB YOUR GADGETS
EQUIPMENT-WISE, Clare’s recipe calls for a ‘ sous vide’ bag, which is different to a normal freezer bag in that it’s vacuum-sealed. this means all the juices stay inside rather than evaporating off, and you can also cook food in a water bath without worrying about leaks.
While Core’s kitchen no doubt has a sous vide machine, which controls water temperature with scientific precision, I don’t fancy shelling out £400-plus, so make do with a thermometer and a vacuum-sealing machine from Amazon (£28.99).
‘ If you don’t have a sous vide machine, you can cook it in a saucepan,’ Clare says.
BAG THE POTATO
STAGE one is preparing the potato. I start by heating my water bath (hot water in a medium-sized saucepan) to 98C. Next, I add the potato to a vacuum bag along with butter, salted kombu, dulse and salt, seal it and cook it in the water for an hour.
The seaweed smells pungently of the sea, a murky, earthy stench that doesn’t fade even when the bag is sealed. It’s got a strange texture, too: crusty and rubbery, like congealed strands of pasta. An hour later, the potato is soft and I plunge the bag into a bowl of icy water to stop the cooking process.
Next, I separate out the seaweed, before putting the potato into a new vacuum bag and leaving it in the fridge for 24 hours. I finely chop the slimy seaweed mixture to use later.
this might account for the full 25 hours of potato prep, but there’s no rest for a Michelin-starred chef.
TACKLE THE TOPPINGS
VINEGAR REDUCTION: Made simply in a pan by boiling white wine, white wine vinegar, sliced shallots, garlic, peppercorns and thyme.
CRISPS: Next, I attempt to make some crisps. this requires a deep-fat fryer (I use a deep frying pan) and a device called a ‘dehydrator’, which removes water and ensures the crisps stay crunchy. I turn my oven to 60C and figure it’ll do the same job.
My kitchen knives aren’t sharp enough to slice the smaller potato into Clare’s desired 2mm pieces, so I end up with several chunky discs.
I douse the fried ‘crisps’ in salt and vinegar and, seeing what a sad, soggy mess I’ve created, vow to use a bag of Kettle Chips instead.
BEURRE BLANC: Heat the vinegar reduction with cream, butter, lemon juice and the leftover seaweed. this seems simple enough, and the final stage is mixing the fish eggs with chopped chives in a small bowl.
THE MAIN EVENT
ALL the while, my potato has been merrily marinating away in the fridge. I pop it back in a pan of boiling water for 10 minutes, then drain it and put it on my poshest plate. Do I slice it open like a jacket potato? Scoop out some of the middle to make space for toppings? the recipe doesn’t say.
I make a few indents in the top and fill them with roe, before arranging the Kettle Chips like masts on a little boat.
FINISHING TOUCHES
THE final steps seem to be merely aesthetic: edible flowers, sorrel leaves, rocket and chive tips, all delicately placed on top so it looks like a flowerbed. the butter sauce is served in a jug alongside.
The finished dish is pleasingly similar to the photograph on Core’s website. But it’s hard to be impressed by a jacket potato, still in its muddy skin, pierced with crisps and topped with fancy flowers.
I take a bite . . . and promptly eat my words. My knife glides through the potato like butter. It’s smooth, velvety, infused to the centre with the delicate tang of seafood; salty, fresh and mouth-wateringly delicious.
The bitter leaves, the crunch of the crisps and the fragrant flowers all provide the perfect contrast to the creamy, golden flesh.
Every mouthful melts away. It’s almost meaty in its hearty, robust flavour. Now I see what all the fuss is about. So has the potato truly been elevated to Michelin standards?
For meat-eaters, it might not seem like more than a side dish. But if you, like me, are a firm spud supporter, this is a culinary revelation — and a reminder that the most down-toearth ingredient can become a taste sensation. Even a 10p jacket potato.