How does one make a hasselback potato?

We’ve got some delicious lamb for Sunday lunch but D and I had a hankering for some Hasselback potatoes and sat pondering the best way to make them. The knack is of course to thinly cut the peeled potato but not all the way through. The most common method seems to be to insert a metal skewer through the bottom part of the potato and then cut through until your knife hits the skewer. But therein lies the rub, ‘until your knife hits the metal skewer’, D and I feel much too precious about our knives to inflict such treatment on them. After scouring a few recipes we find that another common suggestion is to place the peeled potato into a large spoon and then the sides of the spoon would again prevent you from slicing the potato entirely. Again though, these seems somewhat perilous to the knives. I guess if you have a large bowled wooden spoon to hand, maybe a seventies salad server buried at the back of the kitchen cupboard that might work but we wanted to come up with alternative.

In the end we decided that the handles of two wooden spoons could be placed either side the plump peeled potato, would act as a barrier to slicing the potato all the way through but not jeopardise our prized blades. It did work, though a little tricky. The flat bowls prevented the wooden spoons from rolling all the place but they weren’t particularly keen on staying stride the errant potato. Clamping them down would have been useful but not terribly practical, in the end D held the spoons as I weald the knife. Afterwards MC reckons he could construct a suitable wooden contraption that would be the perfect Hasselback potato maker but as handy as it would had been today I guess it’s a rather niche product.

We take our beautifully sliced potatoes and baste them with melted butter, season them and pop them into 180C oven. We bake them for 45 minutes basting them again partway through the cooking process.

The effort is worth it and the resultant potatoes are both crunchy at the rims of the fanned out slices and soft and fluffy on the inside. And they go very well with the garlicky lamb, the lightly gingered carrots and sautéed cabbage.