Easy Seasoned Potato Wedges

The national profile from the food magazine is gaining traction again — someone shared it in context of the Kenosha food drives, and people are discovering the "pierogi delivery guy" story with fresh eyes. Instagram: seventy thousand followers. The growth is steady, organic, driven by real people connecting with real food stories. A podcast reached out. A food and culture podcast with a hundred thousand listeners. They want me on for an episode about immigrant food traditions and modern cooking. I said yes. The recording is next week. I'm becoming a public person, which is deeply uncomfortable for a guy who is most natural standing at a counter in flour-dusted jeans making pierogi for nobody in particular. The Instagram, the articles, the podcast — they're all amplifying a version of me that is real but also performative. The "pierogi guy" brand is growing. But behind the brand is just... me. A twenty-three-year-old who misses his grandmother and likes to cook. At the brewery, fall seasonal planning is underway. Babcia's Kitchen winter warmer, Forest Floor, the pumpkin porter. I'm also developing a new beer: a smoked amber lager I'm calling Smoke Signal — a nod to the Milwaukee Eats column from last year. Light smoke, amber malt, crisp. The kind of beer you drink while checking the smoker. Cooked something that connected me to the history series research: a recipe from the 1920s that I found in the Polish Center archives. A simple potato soup — kartoflanki — made the way the immigrant women made it: potatoes, onion, bacon, water, salt. That's it. No stock, no cream, no herbs. Just the ingredients a poor family could afford. I made it exactly as written and it was... revelatory. The simplicity wasn't a limitation — it was the point. The potatoes tasted like potatoes. The bacon gave everything it had. The onion was sweet and deep. When you have nothing, you learn to make nothing taste like everything. Babcia lived through the aftermath of this poverty. Her mother lived through it. The women who made kartoflanki in one-room apartments on the south side of Milwaukee were the same women who taught their daughters, who taught their granddaughters, who taught me. The soup is a hundred years old and it tastes like home.

Making that kartoflanki — four ingredients, no shortcuts, no apologies — reminded me that the potato doesn’t need rescuing. It needs respect. So the next night, still thinking about those south-side Milwaukee women and what they could coax from almost nothing, I kept it simple again: potato wedges, seasoned and roasted until the edges crisped and the insides went soft and giving. No stock, no cream, no technique to hide behind. Just the potato, doing what it does when you let it.

Prep Time: 10 min | Cook Time: 25 min | Total Time: 35 min | Servings: 4

Ingredients

4 medium russet potatoes, scrubbed and cut into 8 wedges each
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon smoked paprika
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
Fresh parsley, chopped, for garnish (optional)

Instructions

Preheat the oven. Heat oven to 425°F. Line a large rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper or lightly grease it.
Season the wedges. In a large bowl, toss the potato wedges with olive oil until evenly coated. Sprinkle with garlic powder, onion powder, smoked paprika, salt, and pepper. Toss again to coat every surface.
Arrange and roast. Spread wedges in a single layer on the prepared baking sheet, cut side down. Do not crowd them — give each wedge room so they roast rather than steam.
Roast until golden. Bake for 20–25 minutes, flipping once halfway through, until wedges are deep golden on the cut sides and a fork slides easily through the thickest part.
Serve immediately. Transfer to a platter, scatter with parsley if using, and serve hot. These are best straight from the oven when the edges are at their crispest.

Nutrition (per serving)

Easy Seasoned Potato Wedges — The Humble Potato, Honored Again