Recipe by Jodie Smith

Miso Pesto Potato Salad With Crushed Roast Potatoes

Name: Miso Pesto Potato Salad With Crushed Roast Potatoes
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 55 min
Total time: 70 min
Yield: 6

Serves6 people

Prep15 min

Cook55 min

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Ottolenghi Miso Pesto (170g)

$12.95

Hand-packed and dispatched from our Corio, Victoria warehouse, with free delivery Australia-wide on orders over $100.

Miso pesto potato salad is small potatoes roasted whole, crushed flat so the broken edges catch, then turned in Ottolenghi miso pesto that has been loosened with lemon juice and olive oil, and spooned over cold salted yoghurt. Serves 6 as a side. Prep 15 minutes, cook 55, and the jar never goes near the oven.

The pesto is a dressing here, not a marinade

There is a strong temptation to smear the jar over the potatoes and roast the two together, and it is worth resisting for two reasons. The first is what heat does to miso. Miso is a fermented paste and a good deal of what it gives you is aroma, which is why it goes into a soup off the boil rather than into a rolling one. Twenty minutes in a hot oven takes that away and leaves you with the salt.

The second is the pesto half. Basil and nuts suspended in oil are built for a cold bowl. On a hot tray the basil goes dark within minutes, and the nuts and the oil colour long before a raw potato is tender, so the tray browns while the middle of the potato is still hard. Roast the potatoes in plain oil and salt, which is all they want, and keep the jar for the two minutes after the tray comes out. The potatoes are still hot enough to drink the dressing in, and nothing in it has been cooked.

The one potato salad that wants a floury potato

Nearly every dressed potato salad asks for a waxy potato, chat, kipfler, nicola or Dutch cream, because it has to survive being turned in a bowl. Our warm potato salad with honey mustard dressing is built that way and says so. This is the exception, because here the potato is crushed on purpose. What you want is an interior that opens up floury and absorbent and a surface that breaks into loose edges, because those edges are what crisp in the second stint in the oven and what the dressing hangs on to. Sebago, coliban, king edward and russet all do it. A waxy chat squashes instead of splitting, stays dense in the middle, and comes out smooth where you wanted it craggy.

Ingredients

Serves 6 as a side, or 4 if it is most of the meal with bread beside it. Prep 15 minutes, cook 55. The potatoes, the yoghurt, the lemons and the herbs are a greengrocer run on the day. The jar, the oil, the nuts and the preserved lemon come off a shelf, and all four are opened here and finished somewhere else.

Ingredients

For the potatoes
1.2kg	small floury potatoes, sebago, coliban or king edward, scrubbed and left whole
3 tbsp	Kangaroo Island extra virgin olive oil
1 tbsp	the same oil, extra, for the crushed faces
1 tsp	sea salt flakes
For the miso pesto dressing
4 tbsp	Ottolenghi Miso Pesto, about 80g
2 tbsp	lemon juice, from about one lemon
2 tbsp	Kangaroo Island extra virgin olive oil
1 tbsp	warm water, only if the dressing needs it
For the yoghurt base
300g	thick Greek style yoghurt
1	lemon, finely grated zest only
1/2 tsp	fine sea salt
To finish
3	spring onions, sliced thinly on an angle
1 handful	basil leaves, torn at the last minute
40g	Ottolenghi rosemary spiced nuts, roughly chopped
1 tbsp	Belazu preserved lemon, skin only, rinsed and finely chopped, optional
	black pepper

A little under half the jar, and where the rest goes

Ottolenghi Miso Pesto is a 170g jar at $12.95, so the four tablespoons this bowl takes leave you a bit more than half of it. Four looks light against 1.2kg of potatoes and is not, because the lemon juice and the extra oil roughly double it before it reaches the tray. It spreads and stirs like a loose pesto rather than a stiff paste, so the remainder has an obvious week ahead of it: through hot pasta, spread on flatbread before it bakes, stirred into warm chickpeas, beaten into soft butter for corn. Keep it in the fridge once opened, dry spoon each time.

How to use miso paste when the jar you own is miso pesto covers the swap in more detail, and there are ten more ways to work through the jar. The one we cook most is the miso pesto trofie pasta with spinach and pine nuts.

Salt at the end, never at the start

Miso is soybeans, koji and salt, so the jar arrives already doing seasoning work. The teaspoon of salt flakes in the roasting tray is for the potatoes and stops there, and no more goes in until the dressing is through them and you have tasted a whole potato rather than a corner of one. Season this the way you would season a plain potato salad and you will have overshot by the time it reaches the table.

The yoghurt is salted separately, with the fine salt and the lemon zest, because it sits underneath and never meets the dressing. Half a teaspoon through 300g is what stops it reading as plain yoghurt, and it is worth tasting on a spoon before it goes on the platter.

What can be made ahead

The first roast is the part that keeps. Cook the potatoes whole up to four hours ahead and leave them on the tray at room temperature, uncovered, then crush them and do the second stint at 220°C fan forced, 240°C conventional, while people are arriving. Cover them or refrigerate them at that point and the skins go soft, and they will not crisp the second time.

The dressing keeps three days in a sealed jar in the fridge, and the yoghurt base can be mixed the night before. The assembly cannot be done ahead: hot potatoes sitting on yoghurt thin it within about ten minutes, so the platter goes together in the last five.

Method

Heat the oven to 200°C fan forced, 220°C conventional.
Scrub the potatoes, dry them well and put them whole and unpeeled into a large roasting tray.
Toss them with 3 tablespoons of the olive oil and the sea salt flakes, then spread them out so none of them touch.
Roast for 35 to 40 minutes, until a skewer meets no resistance in the biggest potato.
While they roast, put the miso pesto, lemon juice and the dressing's 2 tablespoons of oil into a jar.
Seal the jar and shake it hard for 20 seconds, until the dressing pours like thin cream. Add the warm water only if it is still thick.
Stir the yoghurt, lemon zest and fine salt together in a bowl and keep it in the fridge.
Take the tray out and turn the oven up to 220°C fan forced, 240°C conventional.
Press each potato with the base of a glass or a masher until it splits and flattens to about 2cm, still roughly in one piece.
Drizzle the extra tablespoon of oil over the broken faces and return the tray to the oven.
Roast for a further 15 to 20 minutes, until the loose edges are brown and brittle.
Spread the yoghurt across a wide platter, leaving a rim of it showing at the edge.
Tip the hot potatoes into a bowl, not onto the yoghurt, and pour two thirds of the dressing over them.
Fold them through it once, gently, and leave them for 3 minutes to take it up.
Taste one, then season with black pepper and only as much extra salt as it actually needs.
Pile the potatoes over the yoghurt and spoon the rest of the dressing on top.
Scatter over the spring onions, torn basil, chopped nuts and preserved lemon, and take it to the table.

If it has to leave the house

Carry it in three parts rather than as a salad. The potatoes travel in the tray they were roasted in, the dressing stays in its jar, the yoghurt goes cold under a lid, and assembly takes two minutes. Built at home and driven anywhere, the yoghurt thins under the potatoes and the crisp edges soften in their own steam. Cooked potato has to be kept cold once it has cooled, whatever is on it, so check your state food authority's current wording before a hot day.

Questions we get asked

What does Ottolenghi miso pesto taste like?

Basil and nuts lead, the way they do in any pesto. What sits behind them is caramelised onion turning sweet and miso turning savoury, and that is a depth a plain pesto never gets to. It is milder and less salty than miso paste from a tub, because the miso is already diluted through oil, nuts and basil, and on potatoes it reads as roasted onion and toasted nut.

Can you use an ordinary basil pesto instead?

You can, and you will have to season it yourself. A supermarket basil pesto has none of the fermented savouriness doing the work here, so add a teaspoon of white miso if you have a tub, or a splash of soy sauce, plus a little more lemon. Taste before you salt. The method does not change.

Should this be served warm or cold?

Warm, or at room temperature within the hour. Hot, open starch takes the dressing into the flesh, and a crushed potato has far more broken surface for that than a halved boiled one. Cold from the fridge the edges have softened and the oil has firmed, so crush the leftovers flatter and fry them until the faces catch, dressing and all.

Why has my dressing gone thick and grainy?

Cold, most likely. A pesto is oil holding solids in suspension, and oil sets when chilled, so a dressing shaken straight from the fridge looks split and claggy. Give it 20 minutes on the bench and shake again. If it is still tight, a tablespoon of warm water brings it back, and a teaspoon of the seasoned yoghurt whisked in holds it on the plate.

Ottolenghi Miso Pesto is $12.95 for 170g, and the rosemary spiced nuts that finish the platter sit beside it in the Ottolenghi range, where the caramelised sesame cashews are the swap for a sweeter crunch on top, and the rest of that cupboard is on our specialty ingredients shelf. Shipping is free Australia-wide on orders over $100, and orders placed before 12pm on a weekday are dispatched the same day from our Corio, VIC warehouse, tracked with Australia Post. The Ottolenghi hampers box the same jars up as a gift.