Roasted garlic thyme baby potatoes
- Preparation 5 min
- Refrigeration 3 to 4 days
- Cooking 1 h
- Servings 4
- Freezing I do not suggest
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🧄 Whole garlic, skin and all
Six whole cloves, skins on, thrown in between the potatoes. Nobody eats them that way and that is not the point. They are in there for the smell.
Over the hour in the oven the garlic slowly confits inside its own skin and perfumes the entire pan. The oil picks that up and hands it back to the potatoes. That is why I do not chop anything: minced garlic on a 400 °F pan burns and turns bitter twenty minutes in. Whole and covered, it lasts the full hour.
🥔 Crisp outside, creamy inside
It is both, not one or the other. The skin wrinkles, dries out and cracks a little under the tooth, and the flesh underneath stays creamy.
You do not cut the potatoes. They go in whole and raw, and the skin does all the work. The smaller the potato, the more skin you get per bite. That is exactly why I reach for baby potatoes.
🍗 It goes with almost anything
Chicken, a steak, something braised. This is the side I make when I do not feel like thinking about the side.
Five minutes of prep, an hour of oven, and you deal with the main course in the meantime. The only thing it asks of you is a stir every fifteen minutes.
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🧄 The whole cloves are there for the smell, not for seasoning
I keep repeating it because everyone wants to mince them. Leave them whole, skins and all. They confit, they perfume the pan, and that smell travels into the oil and then into the potatoes. If you want to eat them afterwards, squeeze a roasted clove onto a piece of bread. That is a bonus, not a step.
🔥 Crisp comes down to two things
Do not crowd the pan. A full sheet does not breathe: the potatoes lean on each other, the moisture stays trapped underneath and you end up steaming them instead of roasting them. They will be fine. They will not be crisp.
The other thing is the oil. I use more of it than most recipes call for. Oil is what carries the heat into the skin, and it is what makes that skin dry out and wrinkle. A barely oiled potato roasts about half as well.
If your bag does not fit on one sheet with space all around, use two. One pan means less dishes, and it is also the surest way to ruin the recipe.
🥔 Which potatoes to buy
I prefer the yellow ones, but honestly one variety tastes a lot like the next. What matters is the size. A small potato carries a lot of skin for very little flesh, and the skin is where the crunch and the flavour live.
And you do not cut them. Whole, washed, skin on, that is it.
🧂 Not enough salt
That is mistake number one. A potato drinks salt. Season harder than your instinct tells you, in the bowl, before anything touches the pan.
⏲️ Stir every fifteen minutes
Not constantly, and not once halfway through. Every fifteen minutes you open the oven, you toss, you close it again. Four times total. That is what browns the potatoes on every side instead of leaving one burnt face and one pale one.
Watch the end of the cooking though. Overcooked potatoes are no good: they collapse when you toss them and the pan turns into mash. Wrinkled skin, and a fork that slides in without a fight, that is your signal.
📅 Making them ahead
I will be straight with you. When I have people over, I am not serving reheated potatoes. A roasted potato loses its crunch as it cools and it never fully gets it back.
For the kids, or for yourself on a Tuesday night, it is fine. It reheats and nobody complains. Otherwise I would not make them ahead. Five minutes of prep is not worth the trouble of planning around.
✅ What to serve with my roasted garlic thyme baby potatoes?
Anything that came out of the oven or off the grill, really. My oven-roasted BBQ chicken is the weeknight reflex, and my oven-baked chicken legs with roasted garlic butter play the exact same note as this pan of potatoes. When I want to impress without working at it, it is my beef sirloin with homemade Montreal steak spices. And if something has been braising for hours, like my braised pork shank osso buco with apples or my Guinness beef stew, these potatoes soak up the juice better than anything else on the table.
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Ingredients
- 1 bag of baby potatoes (900 g), washed
- Olive oil, about 3 to 4 tbsp (45 to 60 ml)
- Salt and ground pepper
- 6 garlic cloves, skin on
- 5 sprigs of fresh thyme
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Preparation
- Preheat the oven to 400 °F (200 °C).
- Put the potatoes in a big bowl and drizzle a good amount of olive oil on top. Season with salt and pepper, then shake to coat evenly!
- Drop everything in a cooking pan, without crowding it, and put the garlic cloves in between the potatoes. Remove the leaves of 4 sprigs and add them to the potatoes. Keep one for presentation.
- Put in the oven and cook for about 1 hour, or until the skin is pleated and the potatoes are cooked through. Stir every 15 minutes.
Not here. Mine go into the oven raw and washed, and they stay there for a full hour. That slow, dry hour is exactly what gives you the wrinkled skin and the creamy centre, so there is nothing to parboil and nothing to drain.
Plenty of recipes do parboil first. It speeds things up and it roughs up the surface so it crisps harder. That is a different technique, and a good one. It is just not this recipe.
Right at the start, both of them, because of how I use them. The cloves stay whole in their skins, so they can take the full hour without scorching. Minced garlic could not.
Same idea with the thyme. Fresh sprigs stripped over the pan at the beginning give the oil an hour to pull the flavour out. I keep one sprig back and drop it on at the end, whole, for the look of it.
It is the herb I keep going back to. Thyme is woody enough to survive an hour at 400 °F without turning to dust, which is more than rosemary can always manage and far more than parsley or basil will do.
It also sits well next to garlic without fighting it. Between the two of them, that is the whole seasoning on this pan besides oil, salt and pepper.
I have not done it with this recipe, so I am not going to hand you a temperature and a time I have never tested. I know it works, and I would probably boil the potatoes in water first to make up for the shorter cook.
What I can tell you is that nothing gets boiled in this version: the potatoes go in raw and take the full hour in the oven. If you want an air fryer version I have actually tested, that is my air fryer baby potatoes, and it is a separate recipe.
Three to four days in the fridge in a sealed container. Past that the texture is gone anyway.
The freezer is a no. You do not freeze potatoes. The flesh turns grainy and watery as it thaws and there is no way back from that.
To reheat them, spread them on a sheet pan and use the oven rather than the microwave. You will not get day-one crunch back, but at least you get something dry.
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