For Mouthwatering Roasted Potatoes, Make Them Cowboy-Style

It's hard to deny that almost any dish sounds better with the label "cowboy-style" in front of it, and you can apply that thinking to potatoes just as much as you can to burgers or cornbread. The "cowboy" label doesn't revolve around any one ingredient; it could be the BBQ sauce and onion rings on a western cheeseburger, or the bacon and hot chiles in a pot of beans. That said, if there is one unifying factor, it's that the recipe will be a little smoky and spicy, evoking food cooked over a Southwestern campfire — and just delicious. And there is one ingredient that can bring those flavors to a lot of foods but is particularly great for coating a bowl of crispy roasted potatoes: cowboy butter.

There is no one classic recipe for cowboy butter, but in general, it's a compound butter made by mixing in herbs, lemon juice and zest, garlic, a little Dijon mustard, and spices like paprika and cayenne. If you've heard of it before, it was probably as a suggestion for using cowboy butter with steak, which is certainly an excellent, but not the only, use for this ingredient. Rich, smoky from the paprika and cayenne, but with some tang too, it hits every corner of the flavor spectrum; in other words, it's perfect for seasoning a mild-flavored dish like roasted potatoes.

You can make cowboy butter by melting butter and adding your preferred mix of seasonings and spices, with parsley, chives, thyme, black pepper, and even horseradish being popular options. Or you can simply prep your spice mix and mash it into some room-temperature butter to form a spreadable stick you keep in the fridge for whenever something needs a flavor boost.

Like the butter itself, cowboy-style roasted potatoes can be prepared a few ways. The easier method involves making melted cowboy butter and tossing it with your cut potatoes before roasting, like you would do with any other seasoning for that recipe. But the slightly more involved — and arguably better — way is to make plain crispy potatoes and then toss them with the butter at the end. This approach has a few advantages. You get more of that rich, buttery flavor without it getting absorbed into the potatoes, and you also run less of a risk of burning some ingredients in the butter. The truly ideal approach? Roast the potatoes in the butter, then toss them in more of it when they're done. 

First off, you want to make the crispiest roast potatoes possible, so they'll stay that way after being tossed in that melted butter. The best way to do this is to parboil your potato chunks with a half teaspoon of baking soda for about 10 minutes, then toss them in a bowl to rough up the surface before they go in the oven. While the potatoes cook, you can make your cowboy butter, holding off on ingredients that might burn, like herbs. Then drizzle some of the butter on the potatoes and toss them in the fat before putting them in the oven. Roast as you normally would until crispy and golden brown. Once the potatoes are out, reheat the cowboy butter, add the remaining herbs, let them cook for a minute, and then toss the butter with the crispy potatoes. They will have earned that cowboy label as much as any pot of chili.