Home › Vegetables › Hashed Brown Potatoes
Hashed Brown Potatoes
Sprinkle two cups cold boiled potato cubes with salt and pepper. Melt one tablespoon butter; add one tablespoon flour and one half cup brown stock. Cook five minutes; add potato cubes; cook ten minutes, stirring, without breaking potatoes. Melt one tablespoon butter in another frying pan. When brown, turn in potatoes, spread evenly, and cook ten minutes; fold like an omelet, and serve hot.
This is a sauced hash rather than the dry griddle-fried potatoes the name now suggests: the cubes are bound in a small brown roux sauce, then browned in a second pan and folded over like an omelet.
- The hingeThe potatoes must be fully cold before they are cut and cooked. Warm boiled potato crumbles the moment it is stirred, and the whole point of the ten-minute stirring stage is to coat the cubes without breaking them.
- Brown stockA dark beef or veal stock, made from browned bones and vegetables. A good low-sodium beef broth reduced by a third gives the same body; season at the end, since half a cup of commercial broth plus salted potatoes can go salty fast.
- QuantitiesOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to half a cup of stock makes only a small amount of sauce, enough to coat the potatoes rather than pool around them. The recipe adds the flour and stock together and cooks the mixture five minutes, which is time enough to lose any raw-flour taste.
- Two pansThe second pan means the potatoes meet hot, freshly browned butter rather than sitting in cooling sauce, though the recipe does not say why it calls for one. A well-seasoned cast iron or heavy nonstick pan of 8 to 10 inches suits two cups of potato.
- "When brown"That means the butter itself, not the pan: cook it until it smells nutty and the milk solids colour. Past that point it burns quickly, so have the potatoes ready to go in.
- FoldingPress the potatoes into an even cake and leave them alone for the full ten minutes over medium heat so a crust forms; only then loosen the edges and fold. Stirring during this stage gives you hash without a bottom.
- YieldTwo cups of potato cubes serves two as a side dish, or one at breakfast. It does not reheat well once folded.
Hashed brown potatoes appear in American cookbooks from the late nineteenth century onward as one of a family of leftover-potato dishes — hashed, creamed, lyonnaise, with Potatoes O'Brien generally dated somewhat later, to the early twentieth century — a family that seems to have existed because boiled potatoes were cooked in quantity and rarely all eaten at once. This version, with its brown-stock binding and omelet fold, belongs to the Boston cooking-school manner that shaped Lowney's book: a domestic dish given a light coat of French technique, a small brown roux sauce scaled down to a tablespoon of butter. The dry, shredded hash brown of the diner griddle is often described as a later and separate development of the same name; here the browning is the last step rather than the whole method.