Remember when breakfast was something you cooked?
You didn’t pour it into a bowl with bluish skim milk. You didn’t peel back a wrapper and eat it with one hand while turning the steering wheel with the other. You used a skillet and a spatula and you filled the house with irresistible aromas. Remember being awakened on Sunday mornings by the intoxicating smell of chopped potatoes and onions slowly turning amber and crispy in hot oil?
Recently I wanted to re-create those hash browns. All I needed was a decent recipe. How hard could that be?
Hard. I looked at nearly a dozen cookbooks dating from 1896 to 2002 and few of them agreed on how to make this old-fashioned breakfast staple. We’re talking three ingredients here: Potatoes. Fat. Salt. (OK, maybe some pepper too).
Obviously, the simplest things are the hardest to get right.
Hash browns are basically chopped, cooked potatoes that are skillet-fried as a large, flat cake until brown — sometimes on one side, sometimes on both. They’re almost always a breakfast dish.
So what’s the problem? To begin with, the cookbooks can’t even decide on the proper name.
From 1896’s “The Original Boston Cooking-School Cook Book,” by Fannie Merritt Farmer to 2002’s “A Real American Breakfast,” by Cheryl Alters Jamison and Bill Jamison, hash browns have been called every permutation from “hashed browned potatoes” to “hashed brown potatoes” to “hash brown potatoes” to just “hash browns.” (Do not, as one author did, confuse them with home fries. Home fries are individual chunks or slices, often sauteed with bell pepper. They are not hash browns. End of discussion.)
The books also dithered over the right potatoes to use: raw vs. cooked, grated vs. chopped, cold vs. warm.
And then there’s the puzzlement over the fat (butter? oil? bacon drippings?) Plus, the thorny issue of whether to add a fourth ingredient (perhaps a wee bit of onion?) or even (gasp!) some cream.
And could we please decide if the potatoes need to be browned on both sides (or not) and just how you’re supposed to turn them if they do?
Looking to the past
I turned to some of my favorite heirloom cookbooks, including the 1928 “Southern Cooking,” by Mrs. S.R. Dull, and the 1947 “Settlement Cookbook.” Both of them exhorted me to use cold, diced potatoes. The Settlement browns the potatoes on both sides (you flip them onto an inverted plate, add more fat to the pan, and slide them back in), while the estimable Mrs. Dull doesn’t think that’s really necessary. She does, however, sprinkle her potatoes with a little flour as they begin to cook, which I don’t think is really necessary.
From there I jumped another 30 or 40 years to the “The New James Beard” (1981) and the 1975 edition of “The Joy of Cooking.” Beard, long considered the dean of American cooking, is in the brown-both-sides camp, but his recipe doesn’t call for the cooked potatoes to be cold. This made me suspicious. The old cookbooks were adamant about using chilled potatoes.
When food scientist Shirley Corriher confirmed that chilling cooked potatoes causes the starch to crystallize so the potatoes don’t get as mushy as they fry, I put Beard back on the shelf.
From there I turned to “Joy.” Aack! The 1975 recipe calls for raw potatoes. Are they kidding? Raw potatoes take so much longer to cook, the outside often browns before the inside is fully soft. What a pain. The recipe also requires a quarter-cup of cream to be poured over the potatoes while browning the second side. Oh, perfect, more fat.
Others, however, argue that cream is necessary.
Cheryl and Bill Jamison, authors of “A Real American Breakfast,” toss their chopped potatoes with melted butter and cream before frying them in bacon drippings. Roy Finamore and Molly Stevens, authors of “One Potato, Two Potato,” also add cream to their hash browns just before turning them to brown the second side.
Cheryl Jamison, who grew up in the Midwest where hash browns are considered one of the basic food groups, says that adding cream improves the browning effect.
“It makes them more brown and crisp on the outside and more moist on the inside. You can make them well without cream,” she admits, “but we think they’re better with it.”
I think the cream causes the potatoes to steam instead of fry and makes them too wet inside.
Hash brown conclusions
After trying a bushel of different recipes, I have come to some opinionated conclusions regarding the perfect hash browns:
– No cream. Hash browns should not get wet and besides, they have enough fat already. The newest edition of “The Joy of Cooking” has jettisoned the cream listed in the 1975 version and so should you.
– Russets, the traditional baking potato, make the best hash browns. That’s because they’re high in starch, which helps them stick together better. Boiling potatoes, like red bliss or white rose or yellow finn, can be used, but their low starch content makes them firmer and the pieces remain separate, instead of melding nicely into a large, crispy, golden brown cake. Still, they’re better than eating no hash browns at all.
– Use partially cooked, chilled potatoes instead of raw. Remember, this dish started as a way to use leftover potatoes. Raw potatoes take longer to cook and the timing’s trickier. Plus, the finished texture is different. I prefer the softer texture you get when you fry partially cooked spuds. And they must be chilled. Chilling crystallizes the starch molecules (think of how leftover rice gets hard in the refrigerator). The crystals partially soften when heated, but they still help keep the potatoes from getting too mushy while they fry. (To quickly cook potatoes, you can boil them until they’re barely tender, about 5 or 6 minutes, or you can microwave them for 2-3 minutes. Either way, cool them in the refrigerator or plunge them into some ice water for 10 minutes or so and then pat them dry before chopping. Or, if you’re roasting potatoes for one meal, just make extra and stash them in the fridge. Cook them the next day as hash browns.)
– Don’t skip the onion. Most recipes call for some diced onion to brown along with the potatoes. It’s not crucial, but the aroma and the flavor are worth it.
– Chop, don’t grate. You say you want to grate potatoes? Fine, grate them. Personally, I think grating is a royal pain because some of my knuckles always get included in the mix. Yes, I know the frozen hash browns are shredded, but historically, hash browns have been hashed: chopped or diced, in other words. Shredded potatoes belong in potato pancakes, not hash browns. Besides, since when did frozen anything become the standard by which food is judged?
– Use butter and oil. Bacon drippings were popular in the good ol’ days (you know, before there were ads for cholesterol-lowering drugs on TV), but these days a combination of butter and vegetable oil makes a good substitute.
– Flip it. Frankly, it’s the crispy brown exterior that makes hash browns so breathtakingly delicious, so brown both sides. Pat down the potatoes into a neat, compact layer in the skillet and let them brown on one side, about 10 minutes. Then flip them onto an inverted plate, add more oil to the skillet, slide them back in and brown the second side. If this sounds too intimidating, you can use a spatula to cut the layer in quarters and then turn each part. Or you can just give up and stir the pieces every few minutes until they’re browned all over. It’s all good.
– Don’t forget the salt and pepper. And don’t be timid about either.
– Use a nice, heavy skillet. That way the heat is dispersed evenly and the hash browns brown evenly. Cast iron is great. Non-stick works pretty well, too. Make sure you pick a pan size that allows the potato cubes to nestle snugly together in a compact layer that fills the bottom of the pan.
– Toss with oil before starting. This is a tip I learned from a 19th-Century cookbook. It helps them brown better.
Hash browns
Preparation time: 20 minutes
Cooking time: 35 minutes
Yield: 4 servings
If you use a non-stick pan, you may reduce the amount of butter and oil ever so slightly, but don’t skimp too much–the fat is what creates that irresistible crunchy brown exterior.
2 large baking potatoes, unpeeled
1/3 cup diced onion
4 tablespoons vegetable oil
Salt, freshly ground pepper
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
1. Heat a large pot of salted water to a boil; add potatoes. Heat to boiling; cook until just tender, about 8-10 minutes. Meanwhile, prepare a large bowl of ice water; set aside. Drain potatoes; transfer to ice water to cool. Peel potatoes; finely chop. Transfer to a large bowl. Add onion; toss to combine. Drizzle with 1 tablespoon of the oil. Season generously with salt and pepper. Gently toss to coat evenly.
2. Heat 2 tablespoons of the oil and 2 tablespoons of the butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat until butter melts and the foaming subsides. Add the potato mixture. Reduce heat to medium; press down on potatoes with large spatula to pack it into an even, compact layer. Cook, without turning, until the bottom of the potato mixture is golden brown, about 15 minutes.
3. Place a large plate over the skillet. Invert the skillet onto the plate, using an oven mitt, so the potato mixture falls onto the plate, brown side up. Add the remaining 1 tablespoon oil and 1 tablespoon butter to the skillet; heat until butter melts. Slide the potato layer from the plate back into the skillet, using a spatula. Cook until golden brown, about 10 minutes. Transfer hash browns to a serving plate.
Nutrition information per serving:
325 calories, 60% of calories from fat, 22 g fat, 7 g saturated fat, 23 mg cholesterol, 31 g carbohydrates, 3 g protein, 9 mg sodium, 2.4 g fiber
