Celebrity chef Nigella Lawson says roast potatoes will be ‘perfect’ and deliciously ‘crunchy’ if you cook them with just two unexpected ingredients. Nigella has had a long and highly successful career sharing all manner of relatable, affordable and most crucially, delicious food recipes with her army of adoring fans. One such tip from Nigella is all about a British classic, the roast potato.

No Sunday dinner would be complete without a generous serving of roast spuds, crispy and crunchy on the outside, soft and fluffy on the inside. There are two parts to what make Nigella’s roasties perfect – how you cut them, and two added ingredients – semolina, and goose fat. Nigella, in a tip shared via TikTok, said: “It’s how you cut the potatoes. If you imagine an ovalish shaped potato. I cut out a central triangle, so you have three smallish pieces of potato, with a lot of surface area for getting crisp.

“And everyone parboils, that’s normal, and after I parboiled mine, I add a bit of semolina to the pan.

“And I’m shaking them up and about to rough them up a bit on the sides, and that makes them so crunchy.

“And then, goose fat for me. But you can use other fat, it just has a very high burning point which is good, a lot of goose fat and very very hot. Those are, and modest as it may sound, I’m sorry, the perfect roast potatoes.”

Writing on her own website, Nigella.com, the chef added that perfection is the only acceptable goal with roast potatoes.

She said: “Needs must and all that, so I have always been an open anti-perfectionist, but in truth (and I’m sorry to repeat what I’ve said before) it is impossible to cook roast potatoes without needing them to be perfect, which to me means sweet and soft inside and a golden-brown carapace of crunch without.

“And, strangely, no matter how many tricksy things you may succeed at in cooking, no matter what techniques you may master, nothing gives quite the contented glow of achievement that cooking a good tray of roast potatoes does.”