Rosti is a national Swiss dish, especially with the German Swiss. People eat it for breakfast but also with meat and vegetables at dinner or lunch.
It is a hearty dish, and is also filling. The grated potatoes lose part of their moisture and the fine strands are fried in fat, so the dish contains mainly carbohydrates and fat. Bacon, onion or apple are additives. The fat is oil, butter, lard, duck fat or sometimes cheese.
In north America, the dish that comes close are hash browns. You can buy hash browns frozen in pre-molded forms. The Swiss rosti is usually created by a chef.
The art of making Rosti
Rosti can be made of any potato type, but high starch containing potatoes are preferred. Often after grating, the raw potatoes shreds are slightly salted, that will cause moist to be further extracted. The shredded potatoes are then squeezed by hand before adding them to an oiled, flat bottomed, heavy pan. I have noticed that when using Russets or other potatoes with a high starch and low moisture content, the rosti become more crisp.
Alternatively, you can par-boil the potatoes for about 12-15 minutes, after they started boiling, so that they are still somewhat firm, followed by an abrupt cooling. You can do that by placing the potatoes in cold water and refreshing that once. Alternatively, when you have more time let them cool down gradually in the air or fridge. During the par-boil, the starch in the potatoes binds already the moist in the potatoes, so you can skip the salting and squeezing step when shredding raw potatoes.
Special equipment
a non stick pan works best or use a cast iron well seasoned flat pan
a shredder
Ingredients
Method
- Peel the potatoes and bring them to a boil
- Continue to slow boil for 10 min when small, or 15 min when large potatoes
- Thereafter cool the potatoes in cold water, refreshing after 20 min or so
- Leave the potatoes at least for an hour, until they are also cooled down in the interior
- Then shred the potatoes using a shredder
- Either use one large heavy bottomed pan or use two smaller pans, oil the pans with duck fat and place the shredded potato in the pan(s).
- Place on medium fire and flatten them with the back of a spatula, so they make good contact with the bottom of the pan(s). You can add some salt or pepper.
- Fry at one side for about 15 minutes and then turn them with the help of a plate, if so needed. Oil the pan(s) again before putting the rosti back in.
- Fry for amother 15 min. You can carefully check the color using a spatula to lift the 'pancake' carefully
- Serve while crispy and hot
Notes
Food allergy & intolerance information: none
Remarks
Here in Hong Kong, the local potatoes, that come from China, are coming in season in March-April. Then they are best for this dish. Alternatively resort to imported potatoes from the US or Australia.
For large potatoes, we use 15 min slow boil after the boil has commenced. Then we cool down in cold tap water, refreshed one or two times. We feel there is no additional advantage noticeable between cooling them down in cold water or to let them cool down slowly in the fridge, other than cooling in water is much faster. Possibly the retardation of the starch molecules in slow mode is slightly more effective, but I do not find it back in the test kitchen.
