Hasselback Potatoes Trial: Dairy-free, Gluten-free, Soy-free

Today’s First-try Friday recipe comes from Pinterest. Even though the majority of people that I follow are friends that don’t have food restrictions, every so often they’ll share a recipe that Joseph can eat as is, or I can modify easily enough that Joseph can eat it, and such is the case with this one.

When my husband saw the picture for Hasselback Potatoes from Seasalt With Food, he described it as “Nearly-headless Nick meets scalloped potatoes.” It’s definitely stunning, but not a whole lot of work.

The Changes

To make these dairy-free, I omitted the butter and just used olive oil. I also omitted the pepper, mostly because I forgot. And because I didn’t have cloves of garlic in my pantry, I used garlic salt.

The Method

Slice the washed potatoes in 1/4″ intervals almost all the way to the bottom. It took me a few tries to get right, as you can see from my picture below. I ended up cutting on a slant instead of straight up and down, so with the front end of the knife resting on the cutting board I could gage how far I had before I cut through. Afterwards, I looked on another recipe, and found that they put something under the potato, such as resting it in a basting spoon, so that all the cuts were uniformly deep without cutting through.

I then found that the potato slices (especially if they weren’t cut very deep) just wanted to stick together. So when I drizzled olive oil over it, I couldn’t get it inbetween the slices like I wanted. That led to me using more oil than I wanted to. Same with the garlic salt (which I didn’t measure). Angie solves this issue by placing slices of garlic between the potatoes. However, other recipes for Hasselback potatoes didn’t have anything between the slices, so I pressed onward without.

I roasted the potatoes at 425 for 45 minutes (recipe said for 40 minutes) and they still seemed underdone in the middle. I’m not sure if this was because the slices didn’t split apart very well, or if my oven just wasn’t hot enough or what.  Still, they looked pretty cool when they came out.

Hasselback Potatoes

Adapted from Seasalt With Food

Dairy-free, gluten-free, soy-free

Ingredients

• 3 medium potatoes
• 3 Tablespoons olive oil (could probably get by with less)
• ~1 teaspoon garlic salt (I didn’t measure)

Slice the potatoes in 1/4″ intervals almost all the way through the potato. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with garlic salt.

Bake at 425 degrees F for 40-50 minutes until outsides are crisp and insides are tender.

Makes 3 servings

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This recipe is featured in my cookbook The Best of the Rice of Life: Over 70 Gluten-free, Dairy-free, and Nut-free Recipes available now in print (Amazon, Create Space) and e-book (Kindle, iBooks, nook, Kobo and Smashwords).

 

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What I Thought

Even though they seemed underdone, I thought these were really nice. I would have liked more of the flavor to be inside the potato instead of just on the skin. My husband said he’d like to have these again with baked potato toppings. He finds regular baked potatoes to be dry, but these weren’t. Joseph ate his potatoes when there was nothing else left on his plate to eat instead. My daughter just ignored them. So as much of a success as we can get in our family. 🙂

Edit: I just learned that the Production Manager for the main dining hall at Rochester Institute of Technology, in Rochester NY found this recipe on my blog and fixed my  undercooking issue in order to debut a line of top 8 allergen-free, gluten-free, and mostly vegan recipes. Floored.

The fix – Amy (the cook) baked the potatoes in a 375 degree oven (convection) for 40 minutes, covered with foil. Then uncovered for an additional 30-40 minutes until tender.

Shared at Allergy Friendly Fridays, Slightly Indulgent Tuesdays, Gluten-free Wednesdays and Allergy-free Wednesdays