POTATO COOKERY-- 3 RECIPES FOR COOL-WEATHER DINING

Dollar for dollar, you can't beat a great potato dish.

I’d probably love potatoes even if I weren’t half Irish… but I’m guessing that it helped.

My Irish grandmother made mashed potatoes that I would describe as “clouds of Irish perfection.” Her daughter didn’t quite inherit her mother’s culinary flair, but she nonetheless learned to make perfectly great mashed potatoes. She also fed the four year-old me something she dubbed “men’s potatoes” as an incentive for me to eat them– peeled & quartered small potatoes that she oven-roasted to sweet, crispy-brown wonderfulness. Six decades later, becoming an over-the-road trucker as a late-life career made me somewhat dependent upon roadside diners, and I thereby became a connoisseur of home fries and hash browns.

And so, Dear Readers, the combination of my Irish heritage, my career path, and my propensity for culinary exploration has positioned me to share a few pointers on potatoes. But first, a little Potatoes 101 is in order. (NOTE: As with seafood and other culinary categories, the nomenclature of potatoes seems somewhat unofficial and arbitrary.)

Here is a short list suitable for our purposes here with generally agreed-upon definitions–

Russet (a.k.a. "Idaho" or “Baking" Potatoes)

Mealy and starchy, with thick skins. They bake up nice and flaky (the better to soak up butter and sour cream) and they are de rigeur for hash browns and my version of mashed potatoes. Can be used for home fries, but not in salads.

White Potatoes

The all-purpose, go-to potato… somewhat inferior to Russets for mashing, slightly better than Russets for Home Fries, and clearly superior to Russets for use in salads.

Red Potatoes

Pretty close to white potatoes beneath their skin; ideal for salads and roasting. (For the record, “Roasting” scorches the skins; “Baking” does not.)

Yukon Gold Potatoes

A yellow-hued, all-purpose spud that resulted from a 1960’s Canadian breeding program. Click HERE for the interesting details. There are numerous varieties of Yellow potatoes available that are not Yukons.

New Potatoes

Small (and therefore young) versions of the aforementioned White, Red, and Yukon or Yellow potatoes; one rarely sees miniature Russets.

So, let’s get cooking!

Russet Potato Casserole w/ Cream, Garlic, & Gruyère... a.k.a. "Pommes de Terre au Gratin Daphinois"

If you want to try the most decadent, delicious, and wine-friendly potato dish in the known universe, google recipes for "Pommes de Terre au Gratin Daphinois" or some variation thereof in French, English, or a mixture of the two tongues. (You might want to specify “English” in your search.) Though this dish is perhaps centuries old, Julia Child did much to make it famous, and so we shall honor her efforts by using her multi-lingual nomenclature—

Potatoes au Gratin Dauphinois

This dish originated in the Dauphiné, a former province in southeastern France now part of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region. Dauphiné was in the mountainous eastern edge— the French Alps— where summer bicycle racing and winter skiing attract international attention. Grenoble, the area’s largest city, was host to the 1968 Winter Olympic Games, as was nearby Albertville in 1992 and Chamonix in 1924. Like most of France there are numerous vineyards here, although one must venture an hour or two downhill and west in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes to find world-class wine appellations such as Côte-Rôtie and Hermitage.

Potatoes au Gratin Dauphinois could rightly be characterized as “winter mountain food,” perhaps the perfect après-ski cockle-warmer. I like to think of it as a grown-up version of tomato soup & grilled cheese after a childhood morning spent frolicking in the snow. Peruse several recipes (and of course the comment sections) and you will find considerable debate over nearly every aspect of this dish— What breed of potatoes? Should one rinse off the excess starch, or not? What type of baking dish? Should one use milk, heavy cream, or half & half? Nutmeg? Thyme? (And if so, fresh or dried?) How much garlic? In fact, you will probably find just two things they all agree upon— that this dish is freaking fabulous, and that one must use the right cheese.

French President General Charles de Gaulle once rhetorically asked, “How can you govern a country that has 246 varieties of cheese?” Well, the good denizens of Dauphiné must have felt the need for a 247th, because they reached across the nearby Swiss border for the Gruyère that puts this dish over the top. Though real Gruyère comes from Switzerland, credible domestic versions (from Wisconsin) are also available. The Swiss versions are more strongly flavored and are of course more expensive. Since the main ingredient-- potatoes-- is fairly cheap, top-quality Gruyère is worth the splurge. If you want to save a buck or three, buy chunks of it at your favorite wholesale club and grate it yourself.

After several iterations and near-misses, here is a fairly simple version with which I’ve enjoyed success. (We have my mother-in-law to thank for the addition of white onions.)

4-5 Medium-Sized Baking (Russet) Potatoes, peeled & kept covered with water

6-7 oz. Chunk of Gruyere, trimmed and coarsely grated

1 Pint Heavy Cream (You won’t use it all)

1 White (NOT Yellow) Onion, halved & sliced as thinly as possible

2-3 Cloves of Garlic, finely minced (less if you don’t love garlic like I do)

Nutmeg

Dried Thyme

Unsalted Butter

Salt

• Preheat oven to 400ºF.

• Gently sauté the sliced onion in just enough butter until lightly colored.

• With similar gentleness, briefly cook the minced garlic in butter, taking care to avoid browning it. When it appears about to change color, add 1 cup of the cream to arrest further cooking, and remove from heat.

• Slice the potatoes (about 1/8” thick) as you cover the bottom of a 8” x 8” baking dish with partially overlapping potato slices as if you were dealing a deck of cards for solitaire. 1- 1.5 potatoes per layer should work.

• Top the layer of potatoes with a thin smattering of the onions, a tiny sprinkling of thyme and nutmeg, and a layer of Gruyere about twice as generous as the onions. Salt very lightly; grind a little pepper if desired.

• Repeat the process for 2 more layers. Add cream-garlic mixture to the dish, then clean out the cream-garlic pan with just enough cream to raise the liquid level in the dish to no more than halfway.

• Cover tightly with foil and cook for 45 minutes or so, or until potatoes are properly tender.

• Remove foil, cook for 10 more minutes to lightly brown the top. Broil if desired.

• Allow to rest for at least 1/2 hour before serving. Reheat if necessary in microwave or hot oven.

Potatoes Gratin Dauphinois makes a great accompaniment to cold weather feasts that feature roasts such as pork (including ham), lamb, or beef. And it is substantial enough to be a meal in itself. Some recipes actually include meat.

NOTES:

To properly slice your potatoes, I highly recommend purchasing a piece of equipment known as a MANDOLINE. Here is the classical stainless steel professional-grade version by Bron Coucke--

Available HERE for $138.49

And HERE is a 2024 shopper's guide for less-expensive plastic mandolines from the good folks at EPICURIOUS, a wonderful foodie resource for recipes and advice.

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Heavenly Mashed Potatoes

Before we get to my mashed potatoes recipe, I need to plug another kitchen tool... the old-school food mill--

This stainless steel device from the German manufacturer Rösle feels like a well-engineered, well-built beast that will last for decades. (Available HERE from Amazon.) Mashed potatoes get sticky when over-stirred, and this device makes the blending process quicker and easier.

Here’s the recipe– we’ll leave the exact quantities up to the individual user.

Russet Potatoes

Organic Garlic (optional)

Cold Lightly Salted Water

A Stick or so of Melted Butter

Clarified Butter

Crème Fraîche (sub-recipe HERE)

Milk, Cream, or a combination thereof

Powdered Cheddar (optional, available HERE)

Salt & Pepper

Peel the potatoes, cut into reasonably sized chunks, and place them in the pot of cold salted water. Crank up the heat. While the potato water is slowly rising to a boil, peel and coarsely (but NOT finely) chop the garlic and briefly sauté in a dab of clarified butter. Do NOT brown it. Add cooked garlic to potato pot. As it comes to a boil, melt the stick of butter in a small pan.

When the potato chunks readily yield to a gentle prod of your fork, let them rest for a bit, then drain well and feed the pieces into your food mill while still hot and process them into a mixing bowl. Add melted butter, a healthy dab of the Crème Fraîche you started making a few days ago, powdered cheddar, if desired, and a little salt and pepper– less salt if you used salted butter. GENTLY fold everything together with a large rubber spatula, mindful that the more you mix, the more undesirably gooey the result. Allow the mixture to rest for a few minutes and taste. Add additional salt and pepper as necessary, and thin as desired with the milk, cream, or combination thereof. CAREFULLY fold everything together with the spatula, allow to rest, then enjoy.

NOTES:

My mother-in-law makes her batch of Mashed Potatoes the day before and then bakes it for dinner service… with fantastic results. I suspect that the overnight rest does it good.

A HACK FOR HASH BROWNS

I’ve yet to meet a fellow human who likes potatoes but doesn’t LOVE hash browns. As one whose great-great grandparents crossed the Atlantic to escape a potato famine, I am perhaps genetically predisposed to love the lowly spud in every form imaginable... especially hash browns. And yet, for someone who greatly enjoys cooking I have met with considerable frustration trying to make hash browns at home. I recently decided that this ends NOW, and I began searching for a solution worthy of sharing at Danny’s Table.

The Classic Hash Browns recipe is made by frying shredded potatoes in butter… simple, right? But the potatoes must be a specific type– Russets, a.k.a. Baking Potatoes. They must be properly shredded, rinsed, and then squeezed mightily in a towel that you won’t mind ripping with the force required to extract all possible moisture. Then you need to use them before they turn an ugly shade of gray. And the butter? It has to be CLARIFIED butter.

So, to make Classic Hash Browns, just get ¼” or so of clarified butter nice and hot in a skillet (preferably iron) then drop in a handful of the shredded Russets you’ve squeezed dry. (Oh– you make these hash browns one at a time or else further invite failure.) Quickly marshal the mass into a somewhat circular and uniformly thick shape, and then let it cook. When the first side is properly browned, carefully flip it… and herein lies this recipe’s major rub– if you flip it too soon, you’ll have instant potato confetti, revealing, perhaps, why “hash browns” is plural. And if you wait too long… well, no one likes burned potatoes. So how do you know? You don’t, so you have to guess. And if you’ve guessed correctly, you still have barely more than a 50% chance of successfully flipping it because they are that fragile. But if the stars align– if your potatoes behave and your iron pan is in a good mood… if you manage to flip it and cook both sides just right… then maybe (but hardly always) you are rewarded with this–

A rare example of perfect Classic Hash Browns– made from nothing but potatoes and clarified butter, and every bit as delicate and beautiful as an almond lace cookie. The first time you nail one like this, you won’t know whether to eat it or have it bronzed.

So– all that effort and precision for something with a 50% failure rate that you have to make one at a time AND, by the way, eat immediately for best results? What about real-world applications, like, say, when you need to make breakfast for an octet of hungry teenagers? There’s got to be a better way, right? Alas, life is full of compromises and trade-offs… in this case, however, we searched for a reliable recipe and technique for making hash browns by sacrificing only the exquisite, all-the-way-through crunch of the classic version shown above. And while we were at it, we snuck in a little extra flavor.

Here’s where our experimentation brought us– a somewhat tedious but largely foolproof recipe that yields about 8 decent-sized units of what I would call Hybrid Hash Browns, as they really are a mash-up (absolutely unintentional pun) of hash browns and potato pancakes. As per my research, shredded White Potatoes bind together quite nicely but do not brown especially well, and Russets do the exact opposite. So what we’re doing here is obliging nature by using Whites on the inside and Russets on the exterior.

My search for pure, unadulterated potato flour turned up this, which I’m happy to recommend. If your search takes you to the kosher section, make sure that you are buying pure potato flour and NOT a potato pancake mix loaded with extraneous ingredients. Also, as I’ve stated in other recipes, I strongly prefer high-quality granulated garlic to garlic powder. If you opt to add onion, I have three recommendations– One, use thinly sliced WHITE onion; Two, gently wilt the slices in just enough butter over low heat, stopping well short of browning; and Three, lay them out on a paper towel square after cooking, cover them with another square, and roll them up for a bit. This will draw off a lot of the butter and make them bind better with the other ingredients. When the time comes, you'll combine with the bowl of shredded white potatoes.

If you’ve seen our treatise on onions, you’ll understand that when I say white onion, I really mean WHITE onion… even though, biochemically speaking, it is really a matter of taste, which is why I’ve made them optional in the first place. But distinctions are even more important with potatoes because the different types vary in starch content, which affects the way they behave when cooked. So PLEASE resist the temptation to economize with a single five-lb. bag of one type of taters or the other, because you really need both White and Russet potatoes. (Most grocery stores sell them individually, so you won’t get stuck with way more than you need.)

And finally, before we get to the actual cooking, a word about clarified butter– If you’ve taken my advice and now Shop Like A Pro, you’ll see 5 lb. tubs of it at Restaurant Depot; if not, you can search the Internet (clarified butter is also called GHEE.) Or, in a pinch, you can even make your own, a process that I have found difficult, expensive, and wasteful. Just please don’t cook any type of hash browns in un-clarified butter because it will burn too easily, and also resist the temptation to cook them in oil or (uggh!) margarine.

EQUIPMENT:

2 mixing bowls

Manual Shredder (We are shredding potatoes, not grating them.)

Big Iron Pan

Spatula

INGREDIENTS:

2 Medium White Potatoes

2 Russet (a.k.a. Baking) Potatoes

¼ Cup Potato Flour

1 Egg

Salt & Pepper

Granulated Garlic (optional)

1 White Onion (optional)

Clarified Butter

Peel the Russets and keep them in a bowl of water to prevent oxidation, which turns them an unattractive shade of gray. Shred them into the same water and allow the result to soak while you peel the Whites and then shred them into a separate bowl. (Please stop short of shredding your own flesh. Potatoes are inexpensive, so it's okay to throw away the last little piece before you risk drawing blood.)

Next, peel and shred the Whites into a (dry) bowl. Dump them out onto a kitchen towel to dry for a bit, then return to the bowl you just cleaned out and dried. Next, whip the egg (you can use a coffee cup and a fork) and mix it thoroughly with the shredded Whites. Sprinkle in the potato flour and the salt and pepper to your taste as well as the garlic powder, if desired, and mix thoroughly.

Now it’s show time. Get a generous glop of clarified butter hot in your iron pan. Using your bare hands rather than some sort of implement, drop a small scoop of the White potato mix into the Russet shreds, forming a pancake by flattening it as you gently encourage shreds of the Russets to adhere to its exterior. The result should remind you of coconut-battered shrimp. Place it in the hot butter, pat it flat with your spatula, and then make another two of these (or however many fit in your pan.) They should look like this–

Because these hold together so well, you can flip them as many times as necessary. After a few minutes and a couple of turns, they’ll look like THIS–

The result will be nicely crunchy (like Classic Hash Browns) on the outside, and creamy (like really good mashed potatoes) on the inside. If it didn’t sound so stupid, I would consider calling this creation “Potato Oreos.”

I have found that, as opposed to Classic Hash Browns, this Hybrid version keeps nicely in a warm oven while you are cooking multiple pan-fuls of them, making it perfect for feeding a large group. And if you ever find yourself unsure exactly what to do with them when they’re done cooking, I happily refer you to the homemade ketchup recipe recently posted by my lovable and talented webmistress WinH. My Hybrid Potatoes and her Homemade Ketchup is truly a match made in heaven.