While developing a home fries recipe years ago, I devised a simple, but effective, technique for producing diced potatoes with delight-fully crisp, brown crusts and moist, fluffy interiors: Briefly parboil the potatoes with a bit of baking soda; drain, dry, and toss them with fat; and cook them in a very hot oven. Why the baking soda? Because boiling the potatoes with it quickly broke down the spuds’ outsides, and when they were roughed up with some salt, the starch developed into a paste that would easily brown and crisp. Baking soda also sped up browning, encouraging the potatoes to develop deeply browned crusts in no time.
While those home fries can certainly stand alone, I had a hunch that they’d be the perfect candidate for a sheet-pan dinner. The convenient method of roasting a whole meal’s components on the same pan is at its best when you pair proteins that throw off abundant flavorful fat with vegetables and/or starches that grasp those juices.
Because the
