A battered roasting tin

One of the mysteries of cooking is how apparently poor equipment can sometimes work particularly well. In Simple French Food, Richard Olney recalls how the doyenne of the beurre blanc -- a tricky sauce to get right -- used to operate in a tiny kitchen with a battered enamel saucepan. Here in France, we have hopeless, worn, thin roasting tins; yet somehow they produce excellent roast potatoes, which never stick.

The ingredients must have something to do with it. The potatoes, red-skinned, are waxy and flavoursome. Also, this time, I did blanche them, bringing them to the boil in a pan of water and allowing them to bubble for a minute. The purpose was not to soften them or to roughen the edges, but simply to remove the surface starch. Then, with an hour's cooking time to go, I removed the chicken from the tin, tipped in the potatoes and stirred them round with a little more olive oil, and put the chicken back on top. As in the previous recipes, I removed the chicken when done, allowed it to rest, and returned the potatoes to the top shelf of the oven at full heat until they had absorbed the sauce and had browned. They did not stick.

Spare ribs, slow roasted

We had spare ribs on Saturday. A 750g rack provided enough for three people.

There are marinade recipes here and here. This time, I used about 3tbsps of tomato ketchup, a dstsp of soy sauce, a tbsp of sunflower oil, two cloves of garlic crushed with salt, and the juice of half a lemon. I spooned the marinade over the meat, which I left out in a roasting tin covered with foil for a couple of hours.

As I have written before, this cut of pork benefits from slow cooking. It remains juicy; and there is the additional benefit that the marinade does not burn.

I put the roasting tin -- foil removed -- on the lowest shelf of the oven, set at gas mark S/130C, and left it for three and a half hours, turning the meat a few times. I let the meat rest out of the oven for 10 minutes before carving it into separate ribs.

Potatoes, cream and cheese

This is a version of gratin dauphinois. The cheese transforms it into a -- very rich -- main course. It also introduces acidity to the dish. Simmering in milk and cream, potatoes soften quickly, but with cheese there as well they can retain their crunch for a long time. Even if you slice them thinly, you may find that you need to cook the dish for a good hour and a half. For 4.

Small knob of butter
700g Charlotte or similar new potatoes
1 clove garlic, chopped
150g Gruyere or other hard cheese
250ml double cream
Pinch of nutmeg

Butter a gratin dish. Scrape or peel the potatoes, according to taste, and slice them thinly. Layer them in the dish with the cheese and the chopped garlic. (Add salt if you like, but remember that the cheese is salty.) Pour over the cream, and grate over a little nutmeg.

Bake in the oven, starting at gas mark 4/180C and turning down the heat after 30 minutes or so if you think that the dish is bubbling too vigorously.

You may think, before you put the dish in the oven, that it does not contain enough liquid and that the top potatoes are not submerged. Wait until it starts simmering. You will probably find that more liquid has materialised. If not, pour over a little milk.

Cook until the potatoes are soft, and sitting in thickened liquid.

Chicken and vinegar

Another chicken recipe -- a version of this one. I think I liked it even better. The sauce, while given piquancy by the vinegar, is not as sharp as the one containing tomatoes, and it gets a glossy richness from the butter. The chicken tenderises through slow cooking in the liquid, even though the pan is uncovered. For 4.

4 chicken thighs and 4 drumsticks
Salt
1tbsp olive oil
1 clove garlic, chopped
150ml red or white wine vinegar
200ml chicken stock
Rosemary and/or bay (optional)
20g butter, cut into cubes and kept in the fridge

Warm the olive oil in a heavy casserole or frying pan, large enough to contain the chicken in one layer, over a gentle heat. (Do not use a seasoned frying pan, because the vinegar will de-season it.) Sprinkle the chicken pieces with a little salt, and brown them slowly, starting skin side down, for about 15 to 20 minutes.

Throw in the garlic, and when it has softened a little in the fat, pour in the vinegar, scraping at any stuck bits of chicken. Throw in the herbs, if using. Simmer gently, uncovered, until the vinegar has almost all evaporated. (Timings will vary -- the process took about 30 minutes when I did it.) Pour in the stock, and carry on simmering the stew gently, turning the chicken occasionally, until the liquid has reduced by about half. Check the seasoning.

Remove from the heat, and transfer a thigh and a drumstick to each of four warmed plates. Stir the chilled butter into the sauce, and spoon the sauce over the chicken.

Late night chicken sandwich

The times when you are most grateful for store-cupboard standbys are when you get home at 9 p.m. after a few drinks.

My local Turkish supermarket stocks Turkish brands of grilled vegetables, such as aubergines and courgettes, in sunflower oil. I also had some leftover chicken, from the spatchcocked recipe. I spread each of two slices of bread with a tsp of harissa and a tsp of mayonnaise on top, making a kind of rouille. I scattered over the chicken, and then slices of grilled aubergine. Two open sandwiches. They hit the spot.

Spatchcocked chicken

Spatchcocking a chicken enables you to lay it flat on a barbecue. There is less point in the procedure if you are going to cook the bird in the oven; but it's nice to introduce a bit of variety from time to time.

I usually ask my butcher to do the spatchcocking (or to joint a chicken), because I am so rubbish at it. Yesterday, I managed it myself, without serious mishap. You cut along both sides of the backbone with poultry shears or a very sharp knife, and remove it. Then you lay the chicken breast side up, and flatten it out with your hand. I marinated my chicken: I scattered over it (both sides) three cloves of garlic that I had crushed with some salt; I squeezed over the juice of a lime, added a few glugs of olive oil, grated over some more salt, and threw over a couple of sprigs of rosemary. (I would have added pepper, and perhaps chilli, had I not foreseen objections.) I left the chicken for a few hours in the roasting tin, covered with foil.

I scraped and sliced some new potatoes about 0.5cms thick, and transferred them to a bowl of cold water.

As spatchcocked chicken is designed to be grilled (at quite a fierce heat), I roasted it at a higher setting than I use for roast chicken. I pre-heated the oven to gas mark 9/240C, drained the potatoes, transferred the chicken to a plate, tipped the potatoes into the tin and stirred them with some more olive oil, put back the chicken on top, and put the tin into the oven, which I turned down to 7/220C. After 30 minutes, I turned down the oven to 4/180C, basted the chicken, and cooked it for a further 45 minutes (it was a 1.75kg bird). The risk in using this high temperature is drying out the breast; but I got away with it.

I took out the chicken, and allowed it to rest for 20 minutes on a plate sitting in the grill section above my oven. Meanwhile, I stirred the potatoes, returning them to the oven to crisp at gas mark 8/230C. (I had cooked the chicken on the middle shelf, which I moved up a level for the potatoes.)

Potatoes that have not been blanched or parboiled before roasting are inclined to stick. If you like crispy scrapings, you might consider this a bonus.

I have written this recipe in response to a request for dishes using non-battery chickens from Kate on A Merrier World. My chicken was a Label Anglais, about which you can read more information here.

Plantain

All sorts of exotic fruit and vegetables have come into fashion in the past 20 years. But not plantain. You do not see it on the menus of trendy restaurants or gastropubs. Probably it has failed to make the breakthrough because it is a little one-dimensional: perfectly pleasant, but less interesting than a banana. However, fried and served with chilli sauce and rice, it offers a decent lunch from time to time.

Plantains look unappetising in the shops, because with their blackened skins they appear to be overripe. (Many of my local shops sell bananas in that state too.) But you find when you peel them that the flesh is unharmed. Blackened skin indicates readiness. (The ones in the picture would need to be kept for a bit.)

Having written recently about couscous, I decided to fry my plantains in a couscous coating rather than in breadcrumbs. Naively, I thought that because the couscous was pre-cooked, I would not have to do anything to it before frying. That was a mistake.

I cut each plantain into three crosswise, and cut each portion lengthwise into three slices. I had a plate of flour, a shallow bowl of beaten egg, and a plate of couscous, and I coated the plantains in the usual way: roll them in the flour, roll them in the egg, roll them in the couscous (or breadcrumbs). The couscous (or breadcrumbs) soon turns soggy: one needs to refresh it with a new, dry batch. Because of sticky fingers, one cannot get the slices uniformly coated: it does not matter. I laid them on plates, and put them in the fridge for half an hour to allow the coating to firm up.

I poured about two-thirds of a bottle of sunflower oil into a saucepan, to a depth of about 5cms, and heated it gently, until a little cube of bread sizzled in it. I fried my plantains in batches, and kept the cooked ones on kitchen towels on a plate in a heated but switched-off oven.

They were somewhat crunchy. Not unpleasant; but next time I shall soak the couscous first.

La graine and le mulet

My latest New Statesman column was prompted by the film Couscous (La graine and le mulet), a vivid and affecting study of an Algerian family living in the French port of Sete. The point I try to make is that couscous, meaning both the grains and the feast, resonates as a film title in a way that few other food names would.

Most of the couscous we buy is, unlike the grains Souad prepares in the film, pre-cooked. We do not have to steam it for an hour or so, but simply to soak it. What I used to do was put it into an oven dish, pour over boiling water to moisten but not to drown the grains, cover the dish, and transfer it to the oven for five minutes (at any temperature). A few weeks ago, I checked the instructions on a Ferrero packet, and discovered a method I now prefer.

You put your couscous (about 75g for each person is a decent amount) into a measuring jug. Check the level. Tip the couscous back into a bowl. Pour water into the jug to the same level; transfer the water to a saucepan with a little salt and about a tbsp of olive oil for each 150g of grains; bring the contents of the pan to the boil; tip in the couscous and make sure all the grains are soaked; cover and leave for five minutes. Stir through the couscous with a fork.

Carrots and cumin

Carrots continue to arrive in the vegetable box, demanding summery recipes. I am not particularly keen on grated carrot in salads, and am far happier with spicy dishes, such as this one or the following.

5 carrots
1tbsp olive oil
1tsp cumin seeds
Cayenne pepper, to taste
A little salt

Put the cumin into a small saucepan over a gentle flame, and cook until toasted. Grind in a mortar or electric mill.

Cut the carrots into batons. Put water into a saucepan to a depth of 0.5cms, bring to the boil, and throw in the carrots with the oil, cumin, cayenne, and salt. Cover and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes, or until just tender, adding a little more water from time to time if necessary. Uncover the pan, turn up the heat, and cook until the liquid has evaporated; you will need to stir the contents at the end, as the carrots are left with a coating of spicy oil.

Asparagus, olive and cheese frittata

I must conduct an experiment sometime to test the truth of the frequent assertion that green vegetables, if they are to retain their colour, should be cooked in plenty of boiling water in an uncovered pan. The theory is good: acidity is what turns asparagus, broccoli and the rest an unappetising khaki, and acidity increases in a covered pan. Chefs also advise you to plunge the cooked vegetables into iced water, to "fix" the colour. But both these procedures -- boiling in a copious quantity of water, and refreshing the vegetables -- lose more nutrients than would steaming. Maybe it is better to put up with grey-green vegetables. We are trying to feed ourselves, not win Michelin stars.

For this frittata, for three, I used six eggs. But I think it would have been better to follow my previous advice and use five. The longer the frittata cooks, the tougher it will be. I also threw on the cheese towards the end -- and that was an improvement. It needs only to melt, rather than to cook with the egg.

5 eggs, lightly beaten
Knob of butter
60g hard cheese (I used Cheddar)
Bunch of asparagus
Handful of pitted black olives (I like the Crespo Greek-style ones)

Melt the butter over a very gentle heat to coat a heavy, 28cm frying pan. Pour in the eggs.

Meanwhile, bring a pan with an inch or so of water to the boil. Cut off and discard the tough ends of the asparagus, throw the stalks into the pan, and simmer for a couple of minutes, until tender when pierced by a knife. Drain, and cut into fork-sized pieces. Stone the olives, if necessary.

When the bottom of the omelette is set, but with a runny surface, scatter over the cheese, asparagus, and olives. Finish cooking for a minute or so under a low grill.

Cut into wedges, and serve hot or cold.

Summer lamb stew

The butcher has good cuts of stewing lamb at the moment, offputting only if you imagine a thick winter stew with flour and rich stock. This one has a light sauce, made by the meat and vegetables. For 4.

800g lamb neck fillet
1tbsp white wine vinegar
8 cloves garlic
3 onions, peeled and cut into large chunks
1 sprig rosemary
2 bay leaves
2tbsp olive oil
Salt
2 tins cannellini beans, drained and rinsed

Cut the lamb into rounds. On a medium to high heat, brown the pieces on a ridged grill pan, in batches. Transfer them to a heavy casserole. Pour the vinegar on to the pan, allow it to bubble until reduced to about 1 dstsp, and pour it and the pan scrapings on to the meat. (If your pan is very hot, you'll find that the vinegar evaporates to nothing almost immediately.)

Throw in the garlic, onion and herbs, and stir in the oil. Season to taste. Put the casserole into a gas mark 2/150C oven for an hour. If the contents of the pan are bubbling, you can turn the oven down to gas mark S/130C. Cook for a further two hours. Half an hour before the end, stir in the beans.

Harissa 2

If you use the most widely available small, dried chillis (such as the Rajah brand) for my previous harissa recipe, you get a searingly hot concoction. Only when I saw this recipe, by Yotam Ottolenghi, did I realise that it was possible to temper the chillis with other ingredients. This is the version I made.

1 red pepper
2tsp dried chillis (for a milder version, but still with some kick, 1tsp would be fine)
1tsp of a mixture, according to taste, of cumin, caraway and coriander seeds
1 clove garlic, chopped
A little salt

Bake the pepper in a gas mark 6/200C oven for 30 minutes, or until the skin blisters.

Pour boiling water over the chillis in a bowl.

In a small saucepan, and over a gentle heat, cook the spices until they give off a toasty aroma. Grind them in a mortar (or in the machine you use to make the harissa).

When the pepper is cool enough to handle, skin and deseed it. Drain the chillis.

You could grind together these ingredients by hand; but it would be hard work. I use a small, electric mill (Moulinex). Throw in all the ingredients, and pulse until smooth.

Decant into a glass jar, and cover with oil. If the harissa remains submerged, it should keep in the fridge for three weeks to a month.

This harissa was looser in texture than the stuff you buy in tins and tubes. After making it, I looked again at Ottolenghi's recipe, and saw that he included tomato paste. I shall try that next time -- although I wonder whether it might contribute a somewhat artificial flavour. I might also try adding fried onion and garlic, while being mindful that it is impossible to get a red onion "dark and smoky" after six to eight minutes' frying.

More about moussaka

You might prefer to fry the aubergines, rather than to bake them, for a moussaka. In which case, you might be tempted to salt them first -- not because they are bitter, but because according to some writers they will absorb less oil if treated in that way. Salting is not necessary. Treat the aubergines as you would if you were baking them, by brushing them with oil. Lay them in a heavy-bottomed pan, over a low-to-medium heat, and season them. As they cook, they will of course lose the moisture that an initial salting was intended to remove. In other words, you get the same result.

Browning mince is another procedure about which most cookbooks are misleading. The process takes a long time if you throw 400g of mince into a pan and stir it around: first, the mince throws off its moisture, in which it stews; eventually, the moisture evaporates, and the mince starts to brown; bits of the mince start catching on the pan. If I want to brown mince (perhaps for shepherd's pie), I form it into patties, which I flash-fry or place on a hot grill pan. For the stews in spaghetti Bolognese or moussaka, I don't bother -- and I am not sure that I notice the difference. (More about this subject here.)

Moussaka

Moussaka, prepared properly, is a time-consuming dish. The version I made yesterday was not proper. My use of pork and beef mince, rather than lamb, was just one of the inauthentic touches. For 4. (Or, in our case, 3.)

2 medium-to-large aubergines, cut into rounds the thickness of 2 £1 coins
Olive oil
2 onions, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
200g beef mince
200g pork mince
1 bay leaf
1/2 chicken stock cube
2tsp tomato puree
3dstsp plain flour
35g butter, or enough to make a roux with the flour
300ml milk
1 egg, beaten
2tbsp Parmesan or Pecorino

Pour some olive oil into a saucer. Dip in a fork, and brush the aubergine rounds with the back of it. Place them in a roasting tin or on a baking sheet. Season with salt, and with pepper if you like. (You may, as I did, need a second tin or sheet; place it in the oven below the first one, and transfer it to the top shelf when the first batch is ready.) Bake at gas mark 6/200C for 20 to 30 minutes, until soft. (This is a far easier method of cooking aubergines than frying.)

Make a simple stew. Soften the onions and garlic in about 2tbsps of olive oil, over a gentle heat, for a few minutes. Throw in the beef and pork mince, and keep stirring. It will separate as it sheds moisture and the fat runs. Add the bay leaf, the half stock cube (I use Knorr), and the tomato puree. (I also added a drop of fish sauce, and a few splashes of soy sauce -- as I said, the recipe was inauthentic.) Season, and cook for about 10 more minutes. The meat should have produced enough liquid to stop it sticking.

I do not add any more liquid. Here (and in a lasagne), I like the stew to be moist but not runny. If I had been cooking for adults only, I would have been tempted to pour in about 200mls of red wine, and to cook the stew very gently until most of the liquid had evaporated. If there had been stock in the fridge, I would have used that instead of the cube: again, gently cooking it to evaporate it and concentrate the flavour.

Make a thick bechamel. Melt the butter in a small saucepan over a gentle heat. Add the flour, and stir it in. The roux should have the consistency of wet sand. Cook it for a minute. Pour in the milk gradually, stirring to incorporate each portion before adding the next. Let the sauce bubble for a minute or two, stirring constantly, then turn off the heat. You want a thick, almost pasty consistency. When the sauce has cooled a little, stir in the egg. (After baking, the sauce should puff up.) You could season the bechamel with nutmeg as well as salt.

Assemble the moussaka in a gratin dish. I started with a layer of stew, followed by aubergines, followed by the rest of the stew, followed by the rest of the aubergines; I poured the sauce on top, and scattered over the Parmesan. Bake at gas mark 6/200C for 30 minutes, or until the top is brown and everything is bubbling.

Moussaka is delicious if served warm, rather than piping hot. Here is a vegetarian version.

Cheese omelette

My omelette pan is thin, old, and bashed-about. It may once have been non-stick; now the surface is patchy and grimy. You cannot rest the pan flat. It has only one use, for which it is ideal. Omelettes slide about on it, and never get stuck.

It is 20cms, a good size for a two-egg omelette.

The two important points in cooking a tender omelette are to beat the eggs only lightly, and to cook the omelette quickly -- in no more than a minute. Have your grated cheese (no more than a couple of tbsps) and your beaten eggs, seasoned at the last minute (apparently salt does something to the texture) ready.

Warm the pan for 30 seconds on a medium heat, and throw in a knob of butter, which should foam, but not turn brown. (Throughout this process, you may have to move the pan on and off the heat, to regulate the temperature.) When the pan is coated, pour in the eggs. Swirl them around, and with a spatula draw the edges of the omelette as it sets towards the centre of the pan, so that runny egg can fill the place. Keep doing this, to set the omelette as quickly as possible. (You need a very slick pan.)

When you have just a film of runny egg on the surface of the omelette, turn the heat right down, and scatter over the cheese. You do not want too much, or it will get in your way as you try to roll the omelette. This is the bit I am not very good at; but I am getting better. Tip the pan away from you (there should still be a hint of runniness, because the omelette will carry on cooking), and coax the near edge of the omelette to roll over. Keep encouraging it, with a mixture of tipping and pushing. As the omelette falls towards the far edge of the pan, complete the process by turning the pan almost upright to tip the omelette on to a waiting, warm plate.

Store cupboard essentials

My latest New Statesman column is about store cupboard standbys. I wrote it in response to an Observer Food Monthly feature on the subject.

A favourite quick lunch is rice with several of these items, and others, stirred in. On Saturday, the ingredients were a handful of olives, half a dozen sun-dried tomatoes each sliced into about four pieces, two handfuls of halved cherry tomatoes, and cubes of Gruyere. I had mine with a splash or two of Encona. Instead of the cheese, there might be fried cubes of pancetta, or tinned tuna, or tinned sardines. Artichokes, spring onions, peppers, and pine kernels are among the many other possible ingredients.

New potatoes, Gruyere and onion pie

This is a variation on Nigel Slater's blue cheese and potato pie. It works particularly well at this time of the year, because the new potato skins add interest to the texture. Any hard cheese would suit -- as would any blue one. A generous portion for two.

600g new potatoes, scraped
4 onions, each cut in half then cut into chunks
Olive oil
150g Gruyere, grated
Salt, pepper

Put the potatoes into cold water in a saucepan, bring slowly to the boil, and simmer gently until tender. Drain.

Meanwhile, fry the onions in enough oil to prevent their catching on the pan, until soft and golden. About 20 minutes.

Roughly mash the potatoes with a fork, leaving them slightly lumpy. Stir in the onions and cheese. Add a little salt (the cheese is salty), and pepper according to taste. You could grate over a little nutmeg if you like.

Tip into a warm gratin dish, and bake in a gas mark 6/200C oven for about 15 minutes.

Spinach and pea risotto

This was a very rich, indulgent risotto for a Friday night. The combination of cream, Gruyere, and green vegetables -- tanginess, richness, and freshness -- worked perfectly.

The basic risotto technique is here. In brief: soften an onion, slowly and thoroughly, in a little butter, adding water if it threatens to catch; meanwhile, heat stock in another pan; tip the rice on to the onions, and stir until the grains are coated and hot; add stock, a ladleful at a time, keeping the contents of the pan at a gentle simmer and adding more stock when the previous addition has been absorbed; stop cooking when the rice is plump but still ad dente.

This time, I had 300g of arborio rice, a bag of spinach from the vegetable box, three handfuls of frozen peas, 150g of grated Gruyere, and about 125ml of cream. I washed the spinach and removed the stalks, and cooked it in my usual way: shoved wet into a pan, covered and cooked at full heat, stirred round after a minute or so until it has all wilted, and drained. When it was cool, I squeezed out some of the water (it seems as if you could go on extracting water from it for ever; I give up after a while), and chopped it. I cooked the peas in a little of the stock.

You (perhaps I mean I) want risotto that is moist but not fluid, so the trick is to get it to that state just as the rice is perfectly cooked. At this point I added the cream; there seemed to be rather a lot, and I turned up the heat to thicken it. But the risotto threatened to catch on the bottom of the pan. So I turned down the heat, tipped in the spinach and peas, gave them a quick stir, turned off the heat, and stirred in the Gruyere. I need not have worried: it all thickened up nicely. It served three greedy people.

Pork, aubergines and rice

I am pretty confident that no Chinese chef has ever cooked the ingredients for a stir-fry in the oven. But I do not like frying aubergines: cubed ones, in particular, are reluctant to soften, and tend to stick to even well-seasoned pans. Once I had tossed my aubergines in oil, seasoned them, and put them in the oven, I realised that I did not need another pan for my other ingredients (leftover belly pork, cubed; sliced spring onions; chopped garlic). After 25 minutes, I threw them into the roasting tin with the aubergines, stirred them about with a little more oil (groundnut), turned down the oven (from gas mark 6/200C) to gas mark 2/150C, and gave everything a further 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, I cooked the rice (the link on the right takes you to various agonised posts on this subject), tipped it into the roasting tin, and mixed everything up with some soy sauce, nam pla, and rice vinegar. (There is a more detailed recipe, for another inauthentic pork stir fry, here.)

Simple chicken again

My latest New Statesman column is about how I am not always principled enough to do the ethical, ecological thing; and about how I am not always sure what the ethical thing is. Someone who is sure, on the subject of Israeli potatoes, has made a comment here.

I bought a much better batch of Jerseys at the weekend. I did not use them, though, on a version of this recipe, which I made with a particularly flavoursome Label Anglais chicken. The French potatoes were ideal, retaining their shape and their waxy texture.

This is an example of a dish that might not pass the highest culinary examination, but that is nevertheless home cooking at its best. The potatoes, not having lost their surface starch through parboiling, have a slimy quality -- in this context, delicious. Also, they have soaked up the chicken juices, as well as oil, garlic (I put whole cloves in the chicken cavity), and lemon (squeezed over the bird, and then placed inside the cavity).

To summarise: rub chicken with olive oil, season, squirt with lemon juice, stuff cavity with lemon hulls and unpeeled garlic cloves, and roast at gas mark 6/200C for 30 minutes; turn down heat to gas mark 2/150C, and roast for a further 90 minutes. (My chicken was 2kg.) Scrape and slice potatoes, transfer to bowl of water. Drain, and tip into the roasting tin, around and under the chicken, when there are 45 minutes to go. At the end of the two hours cooking time, transfer chicken to a plate, and allow to rest. Turn up oven to full heat, and cook potatoes, turning them if necessary, until they are brown and have absorbed most of the liquid -- about 20 to 30 minutes. The chicken should still be pretty hot; if it is lukewarm, no matter.

This version has some variations on my earlier one, largely because of the different oven temperatures here and in France. Also, I did not bother trying to remove some of the potato starch with paper towels. Why had I been so fussy?