Tad's Roasted Potatoes

Last year, after having spent 5 years testing recipes (with Merrill!) for a cookbook, it was time to actually sit down and write the book. I did so in the evenings, which meant that my husband, Tad, took over cooking dinner. Tad is the type of cook who prefers to find a few recipes he likes and master them so he can get in and out of the kitchen and back to reading the paper as quickly as possible. His piece de resistance is roasted potatoes, which he makes in a cast iron pan with lightly smashed whole garlic cloves and whatever herbs are in the fridge. He blankets them with olive oil, scatters on coarse salt and coarsely ground black pepper and then sticks the pan in a hot oven. They're delicious every time. Once when preparing the potatoes, though, Tad used some white potatoes that had been in the fridge for, oh, a month, give or take a few months. When the potatoes came out of the oven, they were as brown as a chestnut, with a thick, glistening crust, and as sweet as candy—far outpacing any version he'd made before. The secret, we eventually learned, was the old potatoes. As potatoes age, their starch turns to sugar, making them denser, softer and easier to caramelize.