‘I took every week off work to crack secret of methods to make excellent roast potatoes’

A Shadow Cabinet Minister has revealed he once took a week off work to figure out how to make the perfect roast potato.

Steve Reed told the Mirror’s Party Games YouTube show about his passion for cooking and disclosed his secret recipe for the Sunday roast staple. The Croydon East MP, 60, who sat down with the Mirror over a game of KerPlunk, said the secret has stood him in “good stead for years and years”.

Asked what meal he would eat everyday for the rest of his life, Mr Reed said: “The thing that I really love is roast potatoes. Your figure would go quickly if you ate roast potatoes every single day but I did once, it was before I was in politics, took a week of annual leave and I spent it trying to work out how to make the perfect roast potato.”

The Shadow Environment Secretary said: “We tried different types of potato in different types of oil or fat at different temperatures in the oven and tried parboiling them, not parboiling them, until I worked it out. Do you want the secret?” The Mirror responded: “Obviously!”

Setting out his method, he said: “First of all, you boil them properly then you chop them into quite big chunks as well, too small and they’ll crumble away, then you parboil them in salty water. It’s got to be salty cause the flavour goes into the potato. Then you leave them 12 to 14 minutes which is longer than you’d think, because they’re nearly at breaking down point but that’s the way you get a better crunch on the outside, in my experience.

“Then you tip them out onto a plate and let them steam dry so they’ve gone dry then you get your oil. You only need a relatively shallow amount of oil. I found vegetable oil worked fine actually – sunflower oil or vegetable oil – heated it in the oven to 190 degrees centigrade then put your potatoes into the hot oil. I would throw in some rosemary with them and maybe some garlic, that you squash but still in its shell – don’t peel it so it doesn’t go black and bitter.

“Then you cook that for about 50 minutes at 190c. Turn it a couple of times and by the end of that you get a very golden, crunchy exterior, a soft, fluffy interior and beautifully seasoned.” He added jokingly: “You could eat that everyday but your health would suffer.”

Party Games is a new show launched by the Mirror where an MP sits down to discuss their childhood, why they became a politician and the day-to-day life of being an MP over a familiar board game. In the episode, Mr Reed also speaks about how his fight against anti-gay laws paved the way to him being interested in politics.

The new episode of Party Games is available on the Mirror’s YouTube channel now.