This Grocery Store Staple Can Elevate Your Roast Potatoes

If you've ever attempted to make roasted potatoes before, you know that the recipe is deceptively simple. You can't exactly cut them up, put them in the oven, and hope for the best. According to Food & Wine, if you accidentally start with a cold baking pan, use too much oil, use the wrong variety, or over-handle them, your potatoes unfortunately won't turn out right.

Roasted potatoes aren't foolproof, but there is one thing you can do to make things a bit easier for yourself. The hack, as First for Women shares, involves using a packet of dry soup mix. While using fresh herbs and spices is ideal for any recipe, the truth is not everyone has the time or resources to measure out the perfect seasoning blend. That packet of soup mix in your pantry, however, works just as well in a pinch for roasted potatoes. You'll still have to master your roasting technique, but at least you won't have to worry about messing up the seasoning.

Since dry soup mix is essentially concentrated soup, if you add it to your potatoes, you can expect them to taste pretty similar. All Recipes specifically recommends using onion soup, as does actual soup mix brand Lipton. The Mercury News notes that some soup mix varieties are saltier than others, so make sure to pick one that has a lower sodium content, and don't add extra salt on top of it.

No matter what type of soup mix you go for, All Recipes recommends a ratio of one packet per two pounds of potatoes. To season the potatoes, simply prep them as you normally would for roasting, then toss them with olive oil and the soup mix. All Recipes suggests throwing it all in a sealed plastic bag and shaking it around. Once the potatoes are fully coated, they're ready for the oven, and after roasting, they'll be perfectly seasoned and tasty as can be.