Baked Potatoes with Soured Cream Dressing and Apple Slaw

Potatoes: anything floury works here, not waxy — a floury spud (your Maris Piper, King Edward, the usual Sunday-roast varieties in a British kitchen) has a drier, starchier structure that fluffs and catches at the edges rather than staying wet and dense. Waxy potatoes (new potatoes, salad types) will bake fine but come out closer to boiled — nothing wrong with that, just not this dish. Size the halves by eye: if a potato is fist-sized, 30 minutes is your floor, not your answer — the test is a skewer meeting almost no resistance in the thickest part, and the cut surface turning from wet-white to a dry, slightly golden crust at the edges.

Bacon: this is here for two different things at once — fat and crunch. Render it in a dry or barely-oiled pan until it stops spitting and goes quiet, which is the sound of the water finally cooking out of it; that's your real doneness cue, not a clock. Streaky bacon (fattier) renders more dressing-fat and crisps harder; back bacon is leaner and milder. No bacon in the house, or feeding someone who doesn't eat it — a handful of toasted nuts or crisp-fried mushrooms gives you the savoury crunch without the smoke.

Soured cream: full-fat, always — the fat is what carries the garlic and lemon flavour and stops the dressing splitting into something thin and sour-watery once it sits on a hot potato. If you can't get soured cream, natural yoghurt with a squeeze more lemon gets close, though it's sharper and thinner — add it a little at a time. The garlic goes in raw and crushed, not cooked — cooked garlic in a cold dressing turns bitter and loses its bite within the hour, so crush it last, straight into the cream.

Lemon zest, not juice, on the potatoes before roasting — juice would just steam off and do nothing at 200°C; zest is oil-bound citrus, it survives the heat and perfumes the skin instead of evaporating. In the dressing, the zest does double duty with the garlic: cuts the richness of the cream so it doesn't sit heavy, same logic as squeezing lemon over fish.

Apples and cabbage: grate the apple coarsely and use it close to assembly — cut apple browns within the hour from oxidation, nothing to do with freshness, just chemistry meeting air. A squeeze of the leftover lemon half over the grated apple, if you have one spare, slows that down. Pointed cabbage is chosen for being softer and sweeter than a round white cabbage — shred it finely because cabbage this raw needs maximum surface area to soften under the dressing's acidity in the time it takes you to plate up; a chunky cut just stays stubborn and raw-tasting. No pointed cabbage — any pale, tender cabbage will do, you're avoiding the tough, peppery dark greens here, not chasing a specific variety.

Dried cranberries and sunflower seeds are the one non-negotiable textural contrast in the bowl: without something sweet-sharp and something that crunches dry, the slaw is just wet shredded vegetables in cream, and that gets tiring by the third forkful. Any dried fruit with real tartness — dried cherries, chopped apricot — substitutes for cranberry; any seed or chopped nut substitutes for sunflower seeds, the job is crunch, not a specific flavour.

And patience, properly: the slaw wants a few minutes sitting in its dressing before it reaches the table, not because tradition says so, but because raw cabbage needs that short rest to soften at the edges without turning fully limp — serve it the second it's mixed and it's still a bit raw and squeaky; leave it an hour and it's gone soggy. A few minutes is the whole trick, and it's free.