Czech & Slovak · Side
Bramborák
- Easy
- 30 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, aromatics blooming from the first bite, fading in warm spice.
Ingredients
- 800 g floury potatoes, peeled
- 4 garlic cloves
- 10 g dried marjoram
- 5 g caraway seed
- 2 eggs
- 80 g plain flour
- 100 ml whole milk
- 10 g fine salt
- 3 g black pepper
- 200 g lard, for frying
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
Draining fried food: a rack, never paper
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · egg
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Grate the potatoes on the fine side of a box grater straight into a bowl and leave every drop of the liquid in with them.
- Crush the garlic to a paste with the salt, then beat it into the potato with the marjoram, caraway, eggs, milk, flour and pepper; the batter should fall from the spoon in a thick ribbon.
- Fry at once in 5 mm of lard at 180C (350F), spreading each one as thin as a coin, until the edges go to lace and the underside is dark amber.
- Turn once, give it half as long on the second side, then drain on a rack rather than paper so the base stays crisp, and salt while hot.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Draining fried food: a rack, never paper 77 recipes
- The rack was in place before the first thing went into the oil, not fetched afterwards while food waited in a spider over the pot.
- It lands on a rack with air moving underneath it. Anything set down on paper or a flat plate traps its own steam against its base.
- Salted within seconds of landing, while it is still hot enough to take seasoning.
- A minute later the underside is still as crisp as the top: no soft flat patch where it has been sitting.
- Nothing is stacked or piled while hot, however tempting it is to keep it together. A pile steams itself soft from the inside out.
Where it goes wrong It was drained on paper, or piled up to keep warm. Steam leaving the food has nowhere to go but back into the crust, so the underside softens within a minute: the crispness the frying just bought is gone before the plate reaches the table.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Champagne: when lost, bubbles
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais, lightly chilled
- From the Taps
- Pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus
The universal donors: acid, bubbles, and low tannin rescue nearly any plate: the sommelier’s honest safety net.
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