Polish · Side
Placki Ziemniaczane
- Easy
- 25 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, acid holding everything up to the light.
Ingredients
- 1 kg floury potatoes
- 1 onion
- 1 egg
- 30 g plain flour or potato starch
- 8 g fine salt
- Black pepper
- 200 ml rapeseed oil, or clarified butter
- Soured cream, or sugar, to serve
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, then grate the onion straight into them; its sulfur compounds stall the enzyme that greys raw potato.
- Squeeze the mass hard in a cloth over a bowl. Let the liquid stand two minutes, pour off the water and scrape the chalky starch from the bottom back into the potato.
- Mix in the egg, flour, salt and pepper only once the pan is hot; salt added early pulls out more water and slackens the batter.
- Fry heaped spoonfuls in 5 mm of oil at 175C (347F), pressing them thin, until the edges are lace brown and the centre is set, about 3 minutes a side. 3 min
- Drain on a rack, salt again, and serve with soured cream, or with sugar if you grew up with them sweet.
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
- Grüner Veltliner
- Also Right
- Vermentino or dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Saison
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus & herbs
The vegetable whisperers: peppery, high-acid whites that flatter greens, roots, and grains without bullying them.
Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.