Basic Crispy Potato Cake (aka Rösti) - Mariam

 I have a somewhat ambitious plan for Food Lab cooking this weekend and it began with breakfast this morning. 

Very large potato:

Grated on a box grater:

Microwave for 5 minutes. I love that Kenji is a fan of the microwave. I don't use microwaves very much while cooking, but I am a hearty supporter of non-snobbish cooking. Plus, I was really excited about this trick because my main problem with making hash browns from scratch is that it takes forever to cook them through. I think you can see they cooked a bit here:

Seasoned:

Into a pan with heated oil:

This is where it began to go wrong. It stuck. Horribly. I googled it and it was the pan wasn't heated enough, there wasn't enough oil, or too much moisture. The pan was definitely hot and there was enough oil even though I added more at that point. But quite possibly it was the moisture. They were sticky once they got out of the microwave.

I don't have photographic evidence because I was stressed. Also, I nearly ruined my mom's ceramic pan. I have washed it and put it away and no one's the wiser. 

I broke it up in batches and switched it to a smaller pan because the large pan was starting to char. The final product was something like this:

No crisp, but some brown. There is not a fried potato that can't be fixed with a little ketchup. So I doused it and ate it and it was not bad. 

I was a little disappointed. Weekend breakfasts are my favorite meals of the week and this was a little bit of a downer. I am not sure that went wrong. It is possible I released too much starch as Kenji says is possible while grating but he said it should be ok on the large holes of the grater. I don't have a mandolin cutter. 

But it was not a massive failure, because I can usually eat a potato whatever way it's given to me.

I have dinner plans, next.