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Crispy Smashed Potatoes with Garlic Yoghurt Sauce
These crispy smashed potatoes with garlic yoghurt sauce are the kind of recipe that makes a day of cooking for yourself feel like an absolute act of self-care. Baby potatoes smashed and roasted until shatteringly crispy, finished with sea salt flakes and served with a cooling, tangy sauce of Greek yoghurt, roasted garlic paste, lemon juice, cumin, and extra virgin olive oil. Simple, deeply satisfying, and exactly what I needed today.
Crispy Smashed Potatoes with Garlic Yoghurt Sauce
These crispy smashed potatoes with garlic yoghurt sauce are the side dish that always steals the show. Boiled until tender, smashed flat and roasted until golden and crunchy at the edges with a fluffy centre, then served with a cool, tangy garlic yoghurt that takes the whole thing to another level entirely. Simple ingredients, incredible results. Save this recipe for your next roast dinner, barbecue, or any time you need a side dish that people will genuinely talk about long after the meal is done.
Ingredients
Potatoes
- 750g baby potatoes
- 3 tbsp olive oil
- 1 tsp sea salt flakes
Garlic Yoghurt Sauce
- 1 cup full-fat Greek yoghurt
- 1 tsp roasted garlic paste
- 1 tbsp lemon juice
- 1/2 tsp ground cumin
- 1 tsp extra virgin olive oil
- Sea salt, to taste
To Serve
- 2 tbsp chopped parsley
- Extra olive oil
Instructions
- Place the baby potatoes in a large pot and cover with cold, well-salted water. Bring to the boil and cook for 15-20 minutes, or until the potatoes are fork tender. Drain well.
- Preheat the oven to 220°C (fan) or 240°C (conventional). Line a large baking tray with baking paper and drizzle lightly with olive oil.
- Spread the potatoes across the tray whilst still hot. Using the base of a glass or a potato masher, gently press each potato until it flattens but still holds together.
- Drizzle the smashed potatoes with olive oil and sprinkle with sea salt. Roast for 35-40 minutes, turning once halfway through, until deeply golden and crispy around the edges.
- While the potatoes are roasting, make the garlic yoghurt sauce. In a small bowl, combine the Greek yoghurt, roasted garlic paste, lemon juice, cumin, extra virgin olive oil, and salt. Stir until smooth.
- Transfer the crispy smashed potatoes to a serving plate.
- Spoon or drizzle the garlic yoghurt sauce over the potatoes and sprinkle with chopped parsley.
- Finish with an extra drizzle of olive oil.
Notes
- The key to crispy smashed potatoes is boiling them until they're completely tender, then roasting them at high heat. Don't skimp on the oil or they won't crisp up properly.
- I use this cast iron roaster. It heats evenly and gives the potatoes a beautiful golden crust.
- Baby potatoes work best here because they're the perfect size for smashing. Look for ones that are roughly the same size so they cook evenly.
- Roasted garlic paste adds a sweet, mellow flavour to the yoghurt sauce. If you don't have it, you can roast a whole bulb of garlic wrapped in foil at 200°C for 30-40 minutes, then squeeze out the soft cloves and mash them into the yoghurt.
- For extra flavour, add a pinch of smoked paprika or za'atar to the yoghurt sauce.
- Turning the potatoes halfway through roasting ensures they crisp up on both sides. Use a spatula to flip them gently so they don't break apart.
- Greek yoghurt is thicker and creamier than regular yoghurt, which makes for a better sauce. If you only have regular yoghurt, strain it through a cheesecloth for 30 minutes to thicken it up.
- These potatoes are best served immediately while they're still hot and crispy. The yoghurt sauce can be made up to 2 days in advance and stored in the fridge.
- Leftovers can be stored separately in the fridge for up to 2 days. Reheat the potatoes in a hot oven at 200°C for 10 minutes to crisp them up again. The yoghurt sauce should be served cold.
- Not suitable for freezing as the potatoes lose their crispy texture after defrosting.
What I Cook With
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Nutrition Information:
Yield:
6Serving Size:
1Amount Per Serving: Calories: 220Total Fat: 9gSaturated Fat: 2gUnsaturated Fat: 8gCholesterol: 3mgSodium: 439mgCarbohydrates: 30gFiber: 3gSugar: 5gProtein: 6g
Please note, this nutrition information is to be used as a guide only. Nutrition information isn’t always accurate.
“These turned out well. The yoghurt sauce is tangy and works nicely with the potatoes. Good side dish that's easy to make.”
Serve this with
- Serve alongside my Middle Eastern Baharat Beef with Sweet Potato Skillet for a hearty dinner. The crisp potatoes and cool garlic yoghurt work beautifully with the warm spices and rich beef.
- Pair with grilled lamb chops and a tomato, cucumber and herb salad. The fresh salad cuts through the richness, while the garlic yoghurt doubles nicely as a sauce for the lamb.
- Add them to a mezze-style spread with hummus, roasted vegetables, olives and warm flatbreads. They’re substantial enough to anchor the table without needing a separate main.
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A Day Spent Entirely on Me
Today I spent the day cooking, which is hands down one of my favourite ways to exist in the world. I made carrot top pesto, a batch of sweet pickled red onions, classic bruschetta for lunch, and then these crispy smashed potatoes, sitting at the end of the day like a reward. I also cancelled a date tonight, and I’m not going to pretend that wasn’t part of what made the day feel so good. He consistently failed to take any interest in my life in the lead up, which tells you everything you need to know, but honestly, the reasons don’t really matter. What matters is that I chose myself, and I spent the day doing exactly what I wanted.
Modern dating in your forties is, and I say this with complete sincerity, soul destroying. It’s a topic of conversation held regularly between the forty-plus single women in my office, usually over lunch and with increasingly dark humour. Why is it so genuinely difficult to find a best friend you also want to smooch? The bar is not high. It just keeps getting limbo’d under anyway.
But today wasn’t about any of that. Today was olive oil and sea salt flakes and the smell of potatoes crisping in a hot oven, and a glass of sauvignon blanc, and the very specific satisfaction of a day that went exactly as I wanted it to go.
Recommitting to These Pages
For the first time in years, I’m fully committing to this blog again. The opportunities I’ve lost over the past few years are genuinely immeasurable, but life, trauma, and drama kept getting in the way, and I kept letting them. I’m not going to let that happen again. I’ve been making a lot of changes to these pages lately, trying to make everything more navigable, more streamlined, more useful, and I’ve also been doing some honest thinking about what this space actually is and who it’s for.
What I’ve landed on is this: my niche isn’t comfort food, exactly. It’s food inspired by growing up in Western Sydney and by my years living in the UK. Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, classic Australian, traditional British. That’s who I am as a cook. That’s the thread that runs through everything I make, from the tabbouleh to the beef olives to these smashed potatoes with their garlic yoghurt sauce. It took me a while to see it clearly, but once I did, it made everything feel more intentional.
I love Asian food deeply, but I know it’s not my strength, and I don’t have the patience for it that it deserves. What I do have the patience for, what I will always come back to, is food like this. Dishes that feel like home in a very specific, layered way.
Why These Potatoes Are Worth Your Time
Smashed potatoes are not a complicated recipe, but they reward a little patience and a generous hand with the olive oil. The method is simple: boil until tender, smash flat, roast at high heat until the edges are deeply crispy and the cut surfaces are golden. What you’re chasing is contrast, the shatteringly crispy exterior against the fluffy, yielding interior, and the only way to get there is not to rush the roasting.
The garlic yoghurt sauce is what elevates this from a side dish into something you’ll eat standing at the kitchen bench, directly from the tray. Roasted garlic paste gives it a mellowness and depth that raw garlic can’t touch. The cumin adds warmth and a gentle earthiness. The lemon juice keeps everything bright and stops the sauce from feeling heavy against the richness of the potatoes. It’s a combination that shows up across a lot of Middle Eastern cooking for very good reason.
These are the kind of potatoes you make while something else is happening in the kitchen, they largely look after themselves once they’re in the oven, which is exactly what I needed today while I was making pesto and pickled onions and bruschetta. And when they’re done? Cold glass of sauvignon blanc, a good podcast, and absolutely no plans to share them with anyone.
Ingredient breakdown
Baby potatoes
Baby potatoes are the right choice here because they’re the perfect size for smashing without falling apart completely, and they have a naturally buttery, creamy interior that contrasts beautifully with the crispy exterior you’re building in the oven. Look for ones that are roughly the same size so they cook evenly in the boiling water. The boiling step is just as important as the roasting step. You need to cook them until genuinely fork tender all the way through before they go anywhere near the oven, because an undercooked potato will not crisp up properly no matter how hot your oven is or how much oil you use.
Olive oil
Olive oil appears at three points in this recipe and each one matters. The first drizzle goes on the lined baking tray before the potatoes go down, which stops them sticking and starts the crisping process from underneath. The second drizzle goes over the top of the smashed potatoes before roasting, and this is the one that does most of the work. Don’t be stingy with it. Crispy smashed potatoes need a generous coating of oil to develop that deeply golden crust, and under-oiled potatoes will come out pale and disappointing. The third drizzle is a finishing one over the top just before serving, purely for flavour and shine.
Sea salt flakes
Used twice: once sprinkled over the smashed potatoes before they go into the oven, and again to season the yoghurt sauce. On the potatoes, the flakes sit on the surface and get crispy along with the skin, which gives you little pops of saltiness in every bite rather than seasoning that disappears into the potato. Sea salt flakes have a cleaner, brighter flavour than table salt and a satisfying crunch when they’ve been through a hot oven.
Greek yoghurt
The base of the garlic yoghurt sauce and the element that makes this dish feel like a proper meal rather than just a side of potatoes. Greek yoghurt is thicker and creamier than regular yoghurt, which is important here because you want a sauce that holds its shape when spooned over the hot potatoes rather than running straight off the plate. If you only have regular yoghurt, strain it through a cheesecloth for thirty minutes to thicken it up before using. The cool, creamy sauce against the hot, crispy potatoes is the whole point of this dish.
Roasted garlic paste
Roasted garlic paste rather than raw garlic, which is a deliberate and important distinction. Raw garlic in a cold yoghurt sauce is aggressively sharp and tends to dominate everything else. Roasted garlic is sweet, mellow, and deeply savoury without any of the harshness, and it blends smoothly into the yoghurt without leaving any sharp raw garlic bite behind. If you don’t have roasted garlic paste, wrap a whole bulb of garlic in foil and roast it at 200°C for thirty to forty minutes, then squeeze the soft, caramelised cloves out and mash them in.
Lemon juice
A tablespoon of lemon juice lifts the yoghurt sauce and stops it from tasting flat or overly rich. Greek yoghurt already has a slight tanginess to it, and the lemon juice amplifies that brightness and makes the sauce taste fresh and vibrant rather than heavy. It also balances the sweetness of the roasted garlic really well.
Ground cumin
Half a teaspoon of ground cumin adds a warm, earthy note to the yoghurt sauce that ties it to the Middle Eastern flavour profile of the dish without overwhelming the garlic and lemon. It’s a background flavour rather than a dominant one, but it gives the sauce a complexity and warmth that plain garlic yoghurt wouldn’t have. For extra depth, a pinch of smoked paprika or za’atar stirred through works beautifully alongside it.
Extra virgin olive oil
A teaspoon goes into the yoghurt sauce itself, which adds richness and a slight fruitiness that loosens the sauce slightly and makes it easier to drizzle. Use your best extra virgin here because it’s going in raw and you’ll taste it. The finishing drizzle over the assembled dish is also extra virgin for the same reason.
Parsley
Two tablespoons of freshly chopped parsley scattered over the top just before serving. It adds a pop of green colour, a fresh herbal note, and a lightness that cuts through the richness of the olive oil and yoghurt. Fresh parsley only. Dried parsley on a finished dish is one of those things that adds very little and looks slightly sad.
