Potato soup. Not anyone’s idea of sexy, and it most often resembles a grainy kind of papier mache goop that at least has the advantage of being warm. People try to hide subpar potato soup by distracting diners with bacon, garlic, leeks or sometimes even clowns, but Dirt Candy doesn’t have enough room to house a bunch of  rodeo clowns. If we’re going to make potato soup it has to be a recipe so ridiculous that it might as well be wearing a hubcap-sized gold belt buckle that reads, “Go Big or Go Home.” And so we’ve gone over the top.

.

.

.

To make a potato soup that really tags your mouth like Turk 182 we have to pump up the potato flavor to the max, and to do that we roast the potatoes. A lot. No, really. A lot. First we roast them slowly for about 4 and a half hours at a very low heat. Then we slip them out of their skins and…roast them again. This time we roast them for even longer, about five hours, until every molecule of water in their starchy little bodies is totally gone and we’re left with dry, mummified potatoes that are pure, concentrated potato-ness without a single drop of moisture remaining.

.

Now that they’re totally dehydrated, we re-hydrate the potatoes by cooking them for a couple of hours in a broth we make from onions and citrus and then, once they’re nice and plump and juicy we turn them into a soup with the most concentrated potato flavor you’ll ever find. But that’s not enough, because if I’m cooking potatoes I also have to give a shout-out to one of the best potato dishes ever made: Grand Sichuan’s vinegar potatoes.

.

.

So we soak some shredded potato in vinegar and then fry it into that funky cylinder shape, and then if you’ve got fried potato you also need some ketchup so we unleash a little molecular gastronomy to make tomato pearls that explode in your mouth like tiny tomato fireworks. Under the pearls we put some creme fraiche to add a bit of fat to the dish. Fat is a flavor binder, and this dish has almost no fat in it at all, and so the creme fraiche pulls everything together and adds that little bit of creaminess (and, of course, in the vegan version of the dish we leave it out). The result is a deceptively simple soup that takes almost all day to make, but that rewards you at the end of all that effort by really coating the inside of your head with the rich, comforting taste of slow-roasted potatoes.

.

.