Baltic · Main
Kugelis
- Intermediate
- 30 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, wood-smoke running underneath.
Ingredients
- 2 kg floury potatoes, peeled
- 200 g smoked streaky bacon, diced
- 1 large onion, finely chopped
- 150 ml whole milk
- 3 eggs, beaten
- 20 g salt
- 1 tsp coarsely ground black pepper
- 200 g sour cream, to serve
The skills inside
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs outThe wobble & the skewer: testing a bake
Allergen screen
Found: 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
- Render the bacon in a heavy pan until crisp, add the onion and cook to deep gold, and keep it all hot; scald the milk in a small pan alongside.
- Grate the potatoes on the finest drum straight into a warm bowl and immediately pour over the boiling milk and the hot bacon fat with its onion, stirring hard; the mass should thicken slightly and stay pale.
- Beat in the eggs, salt and pepper, then pour into a buttered dish so the mixture stands about 4 cm deep.
- Bake at 200C (390F) for 20 minutes, drop to 175C (350F) and give it 70 minutes more, until the top is deep mahogany and a skewer comes out clean and dry. 20 min
- Rest 20 minutes before cutting into squares, and serve with cold sour cream against the hot crust. 20 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs out 73 recipes
- It started cold or low and came up slowly: fat that met a hot pan seizes and scorches before the inside can melt, and there is no recovering it.
- The fat in the pan is clear and clean-smelling, pale to golden, with no dark sediment on the floor and nothing acrid in the steam.
- What is left behind is crisp and deep gold with no soft pale fat still clinging to it and no black burnt edges.
- There is a real volume of it: enough to film the pan floor and be poured off and kept, not a dry smear that never ran.
- Whatever cooks in it browns in it and takes its flavour, rather than sitting in a greasy pool that never gets hot enough to colour anything.
Where it goes wrong The heat was raised to hurry it along, so the outside seized and browned before the interior fat could melt; very little runs out, and the solids come out burnt on the outside and rubbery within.
The wobble & the skewer: testing a bake 135 recipes
- Tested at the true centre and the thickest point, not at the convenient edge: the edge is done long before the answer is.
- The skewer comes out as the recipe describes, clean and dry or carrying the stated moist crumb, and it does the same on a second test in a different spot.
- The wobble is read in motion: nudged, the centre moves as one set mass with a faint tremble, rather than a liquid ripple travelling across the surface.
- The other signs agree with the test: risen and just shrinking from the sides, the top set and dry to a light touch with no wet gloss on it.
- Pressed lightly at the middle it springs back and leaves no lasting dent.
Where it goes wrong It was judged on the clock and on how the edges looked, so a centre still liquid went to the rack and sank as it cooled, a dense wet seam under a perfectly browned top.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Chenin Blanc (Vouvray sec)
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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