Hasselback Potatoes

I dove into my recipe bookmarks this week, because I promised myself and the Internet that I would. 

I needed a side to go with chicken, and I found a picture of "Hasselback potatoes" on my Pinterest board, pinned from a fun cooking blog called Panning the Globe. They were potatoes (always good), they looked fancy, and I had all the ingredients! Well, except for the lemon, but I had lemon juice, and I could skip the zest. Also, I had the wrong kind of potatoes - Yukon Gold instead of the Russets the recipe asked for - but they were the right shape for the job. One of these days, I will make a recipe exactly as it's written. Probably. You would think that I'd have learned my lesson by now, but no.

You see, the recipe called for parsley. Fresh parsley, chopped up into the oil and lemon and garlic, to look pretty and, I assumed, be spectacularly delicious. I do not have any explanation for why I decided it was critical that I head to Wegmans to acquire fresh parsley for this recipe, while neglecting to purchase the other elements that I was missing to make the recipe like I was supposed to. Maybe I should have bought that stuff, because the potatoes didn't really turn out as I'd hoped.

The preparation was easy enough. Most websites that tell you how to do the accordion-slicing will suggest that you put a wooden spoon on either side of the potato to keep it steady and to prevent you from being able to cut all the way through. I tried that, but found it too wobbly for my liking. Instead, I wedged the peeled potatoes between two cutting boards to slice them, which worked really well and felt very safe. I whisked the components of the basting juice together in a measuring cup and brushed it onto the potatoes every ten minutes while they were cooking. 

Oh, they were pretty!

But they were very bland, tasting more like olive oil than anything else, and they stayed a lot firmer than I would have liked.

I can't blame the recipe, though, because, like a fool, I used my Yukon Golds instead of spending a little and buying a couple of Russets to work with. I know better. I've seen the episode of Good Eats where Alton Brown teaches us about waxy potatoes and starchy potatoes and which kinds are best suited to which types of cooking. Yukon golds are on the waxy side of the potato spectrum, which is (I assume) why they didn't absorb very much flavor from the lemon and garlic oil.

So I will have to try this again, using potatoes of appropriate starchiness, and see if it makes any difference. It's possible that some of the other Hasselback potato recipes out there, the ones involving cheese, would have worked better here, since Yukon Golds are supposed to work well in a gratin situation.

Oh well. Even if this recipe wasn't a big winner, at least I can say I've mastered the art of cutting a potato-accordion. I'm sure that counts for something.