Smashed Potatoes With Bacon, Cheese and Greens

Smashed Potatoes With Bacon, Cheese and Greens
David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews. Prop Stylist: Paige Hicks.
Rating
4(665)
Notes
Read community notes

This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen.

Get some nice baseball-sized, yellow-fleshed potatoes, one per person, and cut them into quarters. Toss them with olive oil, salt and pepper on a sheet pan, and slide them into a hot oven to roast, say 425 degrees. While they’re cooking, make yourself useful: Fry some bacon; grate some Cheddar; toss a few large handfuls of spinach or baby kale with olive oil, just enough to lightly coat the leaves; slice some avocados; and see if you have some sour cream in the refrigerator.

When the potatoes are soft, pull them from the oven and smash the pieces down with the bottom of a coffee cup or drinking glass. Arrange the smashed potatoes on the sheet pan, and top each portion with greens, a chopped slice of cooked bacon, and plenty of cheese. Return to the oven to melt the cheese, then garnish with avocado and dots of sour cream. Or yogurt! It’s a no-recipe recipe. There are no rules!

Sam Sifton features a no-recipe recipe every Wednesday in his What to Cook newsletter. Sign up to receive it. You can find more no-recipe recipes here.

  • or to save this recipe.

  • Subscriber benefit: give recipes to anyone
    As a subscriber, you have 10 gift recipes to give each month. Anyone can view them - even nonsubscribers. Learn more.
  • Print Options


Advertisement

Ratings

4 out of 5
665 user ratings
Your rating

or to rate this recipe.

Have you cooked this?

or to mark this recipe as cooked.

Private Notes

Leave a Private Note on this recipe and see it here.

Cooking Notes

Amazing, thank you so much. My new go-to meal for up to four people. I used diced ham, heavy French cream and goat cheese. Microwaved the potato. Used a very hot oven and got crunchy sides and bottom and soft interior. I'm now working on how to give it the additional pep to make it sing. Perhaps a tiny bit of jalapeno peppers sprinkled on the potoato?

Taking a cue from Helen, I added the strips of bacon to the same sheet pan for the last 20 min of potato roasting :-)

Very nice! I followed the non-recipe recipe. Next time I think I’ll add some lemon juice and capers. And an herb of some sort!

Loved it. It's a little tricky to smash the potatoes....mine wanted to stick to the bottom of the cup and some of the browned surface was lost. Maybe Pam on the cup next time? No harm done, it was a delicious weeknight success.

I made this on a Friday night when my husband was out of town and I was wrangling our 2-year-old and 4-year-old wild children. I cooked the bacon in the oven and then swapped the bacon for the potatoes. Added green onion to the suggested no-recipe and it was excellent. Super easy. I had everything in the pantry. Felt like a treat.

Do the bacon first then stir the bacon grease into the potato’s before they go in and add liquid smoke.

Love this simple technique to make the smashed potatoes in one pan. They were fluffy and crispy, a super fast and easy.

These were great. Here's a tip for the smashing part: if you flip the cooked spuds skin-side-up first, then smash, the potatoes "keep together" a bit better and are a little easier to scoop off the mug bottom if it sticks.

I have been making smashed red potatoes for years! I use the medium sized ones, bake in the oven until fork tender, then arrange on a sheet pan and smash each one with a potato masher. I tope each one with butter, S&P, and some garlic powder. Sometimes I add grated parmesan cheese, then broil until they are crispy and smell wonderful. I will add bacon next time!

Everybody loved them!

Good! Just put olive oil on top

This is delicious and easy. I used spinach, gruyere, and pancetta. I first toss the spinach in a bit of olive oil. For the non-meat eater I left the pancetta out and add smoked paprika as somebody else suggested.

As good as twice baked, but easier, and good way to use up gold potatoes which are more perishable. Interesting technique with the greens, avoiding precooking. Glad I did not use parchment - easy to scrape up the nice melted cheese from the pan. Green onions, hot sauce, cherry tomatoes all good accompaniments to cut the richness. My potatoes were irregular sizes and my pan was a mass of greens and cheese rather than neat portions, but that was not a problem.

Nearly perfect. The missing ingredient is smoked paprika.

This is a hit in our house! if we want to be fancy we use arugula, Gruyere, and pancetta. Don't forget to make a few extra to pan fry in the morning under a nice yolky fried egg. The crunchiness after frying them in the cast iron is fantastic.

We had prosciutto instead of bacon. Good!

Oh dear lord, I love this. So easy and so satisfying. I've made this for dinner but really love to have it for weekend brunch -- while it's in the oven, it frees me up to poach eggs or make omelettes or just sit around in a haze drinking coffee.

So easy and delicious! I made this last night and it was awesome. Toppings were spinach coated in olive oil, bacon, mashed & salted avocado, green onion, & pepper jack cheese.

The whole family LOVED this meal & requested it again soon! To bump up the greens, I wilted 3 large handfuls of baby kale in some leftover chicken stock I had in the fridge. Just squeeze out excess broth with tongs before assembling.

Taking a cue from Helen, I added the strips of bacon to the same sheet pan for the last 20 min of potato roasting :-)

Private notes are only visible to you.

Advertisement

or to save this recipe.