Home › Vegetables › Browned Hashed Potatoes
Browned Hashed Potatoes
Chop 2 cold boiled potatoes rather fine, season with 1/2 teaspoonful of salt and a dash of pepper.
Put 1 tablespoonful of butter in a frying-pan; when hot, put in the potatoes, smooth them carefully over the bottom of the pan, cook slowly without stirring until the potatoes are golden brown and are sort of stuck together. A sprinkling of chopped parsley may be added and the potatoes rolled over like an omelet. Roll very carefully or they will fall to pieces.
A two-potato skillet cake meant for one or two people, and one of the few dishes where doing nothing is the technique.
- Leave it aloneThe whole recipe hinges on not stirring. The starch on the cut surfaces has to set against the hot pan to bind the cake; every poke breaks the crust and you end up with loose fried potato. Give it eight to ten minutes over medium-low before you even check the underside.
- Cold potatoes onlyBoiled and cooled potatoes hold their shape and release less water. Hot, freshly boiled ones steam in the pan and are more likely to break down. A waxy or all-purpose potato tends to hold together better than a floury baker.
- Pan sizeTwo potatoes want a 7- or 8-inch skillet. In a large pan the layer is too thin to roll and will simply crisp into fragments. Cast iron or heavy carbon steel gives the most even browning.
- The butterA single tablespoon is scant, and works best in a well-seasoned or nonstick pan. In stainless, consider a little more butter or a spoonful of neutral oil, or the cake may stick before it browns.
- Rolling it overFold rather than flip. Loosen the edge all around with a thin spatula, tip the pan away from you, and roll the far edge over onto itself as you would an omelet. If it resists, it has not browned enough yet.
- YieldServes one generously or two as a side. The recipe scales, but cook in batches rather than crowding a bigger pan.
Hashed potatoes are a thrift dish before they are anything else: yesterday's boiled potatoes, already cooked and paid for, become today's hot dish for the price of a spoonful of butter. The instruction to roll the cake "like an omelet" suggests an ambition to make an economy dish look deliberate at the table. The word hash comes from the French hacher, to chop, and the same logic produced corned beef hash and the American diner's hash browns, which are generally traced to hotel and restaurant kitchens of the later nineteenth century. In this version the potatoes are boiled first and chopped after, which helps them bind into a cake.