Potato Waffles with Oven-Roasted Vegetables and Burrata

Potato: a floury, high-starch variety behaves better here than a waxy salad potato — more starch means more glue holding the waffle together once the water's gone, and a drier crumb once cooked. In the UK that's a Maris Piper or King Edward, the ones sold for baking and mash rather than for potato salad. If all you've got is waxy, add a touch more flour to compensate for the weaker bind.

The egg and flour are the mortar, not the bricks — egg gives protein that sets like glue in the heat, flour soaks up any last moisture and thickens the mix so it holds a waffle's shape instead of running flat across the iron. Breadcrumbs do a similar job from the other direction: they're already dry, so they draw moisture in rather than release it, and they give the crumb some bite. Dried ones work because they're stable; if you only have fresh breadcrumbs, dry them in a low oven first or you've undone your squeezing.

Cheddar here is for savour and a little stretch, not melt — you want a mature one because a mild cheddar brings nothing but fat; "mature" is doing real flavour work that a young cheese can't. Onion, finely chopped rather than grated, keeps its own texture and a bit of sweetness that cuts the starchiness of the potato — grate it instead and it disappears into mush and bleeds liquid back into the mix you just dried out.

For the vegetables: courgette and aubergine are both watery vegetables, which is why they need real heat and a decent gap on the tray rather than a crowded dish — crowd them and they release steam that has nowhere to go, and you get boiled vegetables with a roast's name. 200°C fan is enough to drive off that water as steam and brown the surface before the inside turns to mush; you're watching for the courgette to go translucent at the edges and the aubergine to collapse and darken, not counting to twenty-five and stopping. Garlic grated fine rather than sliced dissolves straight into the oil and coats everything evenly instead of burning in patches, which is the usual reason roast garlic turns bitter. Rosemary dried is fine, even better than fresh here, because dried herbs want sustained heat to release their oil — a quick stir-fry wastes fresh rosemary, a twenty-minute roast suits dried rosemary perfectly.

Burrata isn't cooked, it's placed — the stracciatella centre wants gentle warmth from the hot vegetables and waffles around it, not an oven of its own, or it turns from a soft pool into rubber. Pine nuts are toasted beforehand for the same reason bread is toasted before a salad: raw, they're soft and a bit bland; a few minutes in a dry pan until they go from pale to light gold gives you the crunch and the nutty bitterness that holds its own against the cream of the burrata. If pine nuts aren't to hand, any oil-rich nut with a similar size — flaked almonds, chopped hazelnuts — does the same job, so long as you toast it. And the olive oil at the end, raw, uncooked — that's for scent, not fat; any oil with a clean, neutral smell works for frying, but at the finish you want one with flavour of its own, which is the whole point of drizzling it on at the very end rather than cooking with it.

This isn't a five-minute supper. The potato needs its ten minutes of patience before you've even started cooking, and the vegetables need their quiet half hour in the oven while you're not fussing over them — that's where a second waffle or two gets made. Feeds four as a light main or a generous side to something plainer; in a flat with no kazan and no waffle iron built for a crowd, you cook the waffles one at a time and keep the early ones warm on a rack over a low oven shelf, not stacked on a plate where the steam from each one goes straight back into the one below and undoes your crisping.