Smashed Potatoes With Garlic Basil Aioli

I’m going to preface this recipe with a warning: I am a chronic overuser of garlic. I can’t help it! I’m a garlic psychopath. If I see a recipe call for three cloves, I double it. I never trust the judgment of the recipe writer to account for how much garlic I enjoy in a dish. The amount of garlic called for in this recipe for smashed potatoes with garlic basil aioli might seem too intense for you, but I’m keeping it as is for my garlic-obsessed brethren. Feel free to scale back. Heck, you can use one solitary clove if that sounds good to you. To each his/her own, but this is my website, my recipe, and I make it with the amount of cloves indicated below. 

Recipe here, and more information after the recipe and photos because I’ve been on the internet long enough to know that the most common gripe with food blogs and online recipes is that the blogger rambles on for too long without sharing the recipe. But if you enjoy rambles, there will be some below. 

Smashed Potatoes with Garlic Basil Aioli

Grew (or bought!) some adorable little potatoes and want to really showcase the flavor and color? Wow your friends or family with these adorable and delicious little smashed potatoes with garlic basil aioli. Great as a side dish for a BBQ.

5 from 1 vote

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Course Side Dish

Servings 4

Ingredients

  

1x2x3x

• 1 ½ lbs tiny potatoes — I used purple sun potatoes freshly harvested from the garden
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tsp sea salt
• 4 cloves garlic (not for the faint of heart, but garlic lovers, this one is for YOU!!) finely minced or use food processor
• 1 c vegan mayo (I used Follow Your Heart brand)
• 1 tsp lemon juice
• dash of salt to taste
• 12 basil leaves

Instructions

 

• Preheat the oven to 425 degrees (400 if you are using the convection setting). Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper.
• In a medium bowl, toss potatoes with olive oil and sea salt, then spread out on baking sheet. Bake for 25 -30 minutes, until lightly browned and softened.
• While potatoes are baking, make aioli. First chop garlic finely in a food processor using blade attachment. Then add remaining ingredients, adding basil last. Adjust salt and lemon juice to taste, and maybe add a few drops of olive oil to thin to desired consistency. Store in a tupperware for up to three days, but it'll be gone before then!
• Take another baking sheet and align it with the sheet with your potatoes, and press down evenly. This does the job of smashing all of the potatoes at the same time, and feels so satisfying! You can go back through and individually smash some more tatties if they’re not flattened enough, but this is a good first pass.
• Pop them back in the oven for 3-5 minutes to get them nice and crispy.
• Top liberally with dollops of garlic basil aioli and enjoy!

Keyword potatoes

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Without fail, anytime I make a potato-based recipe I always silently marvel, “Ah, the humble potato!” Which honestly sounds like a great band name if you ask me, or perhaps a vegan cafe. Or a food truck that serves potatoes in all of their glorious forms — hashbrowns, tots, fries (crinkle, waffle, steak, shoestring), home fries, baked, mashed…ugh, now I’m just making myself hungry. And maybe giving away a business idea, but hopefully something like this already exists because I want to eat there. 

This year, I ordered a few varieties of potatoes from The Maine Potato Lady — purple sun, Adirondack red, and German butterball (aka what we lovingly refer to our baby daughter as) — and planted them in a couple grow bags before I realized I waaaay overordered and had no more room. So I planted the rest in a makeshift bed consisting of 100% woodchips! I’m documenting my experiment on my YouTube channel (you can see the first video here) and things are looking pretty promising. The potatoes in this recipe were from one of the grow bags, but I’ll be harvesting the potato beds in the next few weeks based on how the current state of the foliage.

Potatoes are definitely one of those garden crops where I truly feel as though I could survive an apocalyptic situation with my (still what I call beginner) gardening skills. Well, if I had a bit of advance notice, ample seed potatoes, and electricity to power our well and irrigation system. But let’s not split hairs here. They’re such a delightfully fun crop to grow, and next year I think I’m going to try tucking them in the front yard because the plants set off pretty flowers and the foliage will fill in some empty areas nicely. And I’m going to order a bunch of different varieties because I’ve officially caught the potato bug! But not a potato bug, because I will scream if I ever see one. Sometimes I really think I picked the wrong hobby because while I adore gardening and growing my own food, I truly cannot handle pests. I eek, ack, and GAH scream like a dang Cathy cartoon whenever I see something munching on my plants!