Tilly Ramsay’s Cooking Hack Will Transform How You Make Roast Potatoes

If you followed the Celebrity MasterChef journey closely a few months back now, you’ll know that during the comp contestant (and daughter of famous chef Gordon Ramsay) Tilly Ramsay produced a duck dish that wowed judges and audiences alike. But perhaps the most noteworthy part of her recipe, however, was her hack for making perfect roasted potatoes.

If you missed the cooking tip the first time around, you’re in luck because the team at MasterChef shared a rundown of the hack with us – which we’re going to pass on to you here.

What’s Tilly Ramsay’s perfect roasted potatoes hack?

It’s quite simple, really.

In the episode, Ramsay shared that she first par-boiled her potatoes until they were “just tender”. Once ready, she drained the water from the saucepan.

She explained that:

“I keep them in the pan, steaming – with something over the top – and then, to get them really fluffy and crispy and delicious, but still really fluffy on the inside, just give them a shake in the pan like this [imitates shaking] to fluff up their outsides.”

While cooking during Celebrity MasterChef, we saw Ramsay put this hack to good use. She took a baking tray and popped it over the top of her saucepan of potatoes, then using a tea towel (safety first) held the tray and saucepan together while giving them a good shake.

You could hear Ramsay’s fellow contestants cheering her on in the background, oohing and ahhing at her technique before yelling out that she should make a TikTok video out of the potato hack. Which, honestly, isn’t a bad idea.

After shaking up the boiled potatoes, Ramsay then popped them into a large pan and coated them in duck fat, “so it [the potatoes] gets some better flavour”. Goose fat also works if you’re not a duck fan, FYI.

The last step is throwing the potatoes into an oven pan or tray, “then straight into the oven and crank up the heat”.

Follow those steps and you should have yourself some perfect roasted potatoes. Oh, and if you want to learn how to make a steak to go with your potatoes, check out the clever cooking hack shared by Melissa Leong.

This article has been updated since its original publish date.