Rosti Rosti!

Beautiful, lovely, buttery, crispy potato goodness. Potato rosti has long been a favourite of mine. Eaten in fancy restaurants in a towering stack of tastiness, or as a wholesome meal when holidaying in mountainous terrain, the crisp crunch of potato cakes makes me salivate every time. So they are on this evening's dinner menu.

Originating from Switzerland, it was a breakfast commonly eaten by farmers in the canton of Bern (thank you Wikipedia).

It is essentially a potato pancake, but a quick search on the interweb proves to me what I've suspected all along. The Swiss are very secretive about their recipe.

Googling for rosti recipes will have your mind boggling - there are so many variations, and so many different cooking techniques that I started to doubt they were all for the same thing.

I guess how you cook your rosti depends on the vision you have in your head for the end result. For me, it is a potato cake about the diameter of a mug, a few centimetres tall, with crisp and well defined potato strands on the top. For others, it may be a slice of a large and thin potato pancake, but I find that the soft middle in mine is perfect for mopping up excess sauce. 

So, whatever way you plan to make it, the basic ingredients are the same:

(for two hungry people)

• 2 potatoes - around the size of baking potatoes. I've tried both waxy and floury and couldn't tell the difference, so use whatever is in my vegetable drawer. I'm not one for buying specific items to just cook my dinner.
• 1 small white onion - this is a disputed item, but I like the oniony bite it gives to the finished cake.
• Butter x lots - all down to personal preference, but I use lots of salted butter.

My Method:

• Peel the potatoes and onions
• Put your oven onto around 180 degrees C, or gas mark 7 if your oven is as unpredictable as mine!
• Grate the potatoes and onions - I use the grater attachment on my food processor but before I had one of those nifty gadgets, I used a cheese grater - just mind your knuckles!
• Wrap the grated potato and onion in a clean tea towel and gather up the ends, creating a tight ball.
• Head outside and swing the tea towel around until no more water comes out your potatoes (excellent workout for the bingo wings, but you can end up soaking your feet)
• Form your potato and onion mixture into cakes and press down well. I use metal chef's rings, but anything will work - cookie cutters, whatever. Metal ones are better because you can use them in your pan with direct heat. This is the point to decide how thick you want your cakes.
• Heat a heavy bottomed (all my pans are just like me) frying pan over a medium heat with half a tablespoon of olive oil and as much butter as you dare.
• Slide a fish slice under your ring (fnar fnar) and transfer it into the pan. Repeat with the other one.
• At this point, how long you need to cook it before flipping depends on how thick the base of your pan is and how hot you have it. You are looking for a light golden colour on individual strands of potato like in the photo above. For me, it's normally around five minutes.
• Flip your rings (haha!) - be careful! I use lots of butter, and every time I do this, I end up spattering myself with hot butter and oil. 
• Push your potato down inside the ring to ensure that the uncooked side is in contact with the pan. Add another chunk of butter into the pan. Cook for however long you cooked the first side. 
• Take the pan off the heat, and don't panic - you're not going to get raw potato!
• Oil a baking tray with a little olive oil and carefully move your rings onto it
• Remove the rings - the potato should hold its shape well.
• Put a knob of butter on top of each one, and wang it in the oven for fifteen to twenty minutes.

My favourite thing about this is that if you're running late with the rest of your dish, as often happens in my household, you can turn the oven off and leave them in there. I've left them in for a further twenty minutes with the oven off without them losing their crisp outer shell. 

 

What you should end up with, is a lovely crisp top and bottom, and an inside that is almost like buttery mashed potatoes. Except tonight, when I was too busy taking the above photo and burnt the arse on mine! Still tasty as hell though.