Crispy Smashed Buffalo Potatoes

One thing I didn’t really need was another potato recipe. Or another smashed potato recipe. Or another crispy potato recipe. And yet there I found myself, eagerly putting Chrissy Teigen’s crispy smashed Buffalo potatoes together, happily digging into the finished potatoes, and savoring every last bite. I love potatoes and found the glory of smashed/flattened/squashed potato recipes years ago.

One thing that was different from any of the other potato recipes I have tried was cooking these potatoes on the bottom of the hot oven. The only other time I have ever cooked anything on the bottom of the oven was placing a pie there, as suggested by David Leite himself. I needed to get the bottom crust browned and it wasn’t working in the oven itself. Well, it worked with the pie and it worked with these potatoes. The potatoes came out with a deep, golden, crispy deliciousness. It is said that we eat first with our eyes, and these tasted wonderful even before putting them in our mouths.

Instead of pouring the sauces over the potatoes, I put the potatoes on our plates and spooned dollops of the sauces next to them. That way the potatoes retained their crispness, and we could control how much sauce we wanted for each bite. It also made a difference with the leftover potatoes. They were not at all soggy. They crisped up beautifully in our air fryer, and there was plenty of leftover sauce for dipping.

Speaking of the sauces, the blue cheese sauce was not blue cheese-y enough to our taste. I added an additional 1/3 cup of blue cheese, in this case Stilton, (hey it’s what we had) which was perfect.

The first time I made these we had them with burgers. The second time I made them, not even a week later, we had them with ribs. And then there were the leftover, crispy pieces we enjoyed just using our fingers as a vehicle to get them into our mouths. I made a note for this recipe that says, “Make many more than you think you will even be able to eat.” I didn’t follow my own advice the last time I made these potatoes, and kicked myself the next day when I was craving them, and we did not have enough. I hope that I have better luck next time.