Who was the marketing genius to take a panful of potatos and make them into smaller, retangularish bits of yumminess?
When did this first happen?
Did they receive a Nobel Prize for Awesomeness?
If they’re not shredded, they’re not hash browns; they’re home fries. So said my father and I’ll defend it to the. . .er. . .mild illness.
A good side order of hash browns is a ticket to Greasy Nirvana.
They used to have them at our weekly Tumor Conference, but now it’s just pseudo-home fries. What a disappointment.
It’s what you make when you’re fresh out of corned beef, right?
Probably the same guy who put the bomp in things.
Chefguy, I agree with your father, but I don’t think others do. If chunked, home fries are not fused together, hash browns would be.
See also latkes and rösti. I am guessing that hash browns are based on something else.
I love them, and order them at restaurants because they’re a pain in the ass to make at home. Still, no Nobel for that guy because he forgot to add bacon.
Yeah, I’d say that hash browns came by way of latke, the only difference being the egg is in the latter, instead of being fried and served on top. Home fries have been around probably since the beginning of the potato. Hash browns are simple to make, lurking horror, unless you insist on par-boiling the potatoes, which is just wrong.
How do you make them without par-boiling? This inevitably (for me at least) results in a big pile of potato-jello.
Shred them raw, heat the bacon fat (or canola, if you’re of that persuasion) to sizzling, drop the potatoes in the fat (not too thick a layer or they won’t all cook through). I usually turn the heat to medium and cover the pan. That way the potatoes get thoroughly cooked. Take the cover off, flip the spuds as one unit and brown the other side. Easy.*
*If you want to par-boil, it’s fine. It’s just an extra step that I find unnecessary.
James Q. Hashbrown, after whom it’s named.
- March 10th.
No, merely a Presidential citation for helping to advance the field of Kickassetry.
Wikipedia (yeah, I know) is completely uninformative on the origin of hash browns.
I don’t have a cite, but I heard somewhere that hashbrowns were an offshoot of the production of french fries when some food scientist was trying to figure out what to do with the odd bits left over from the manufacturing process. I’ll see if I can find some more info.
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Moved from General Questions to Cafe Society, where food threads live.
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Ah, I see that it was Tater Tots developed by Ore-Ida that were actually made from left over bits of potatoes.
This seems to be describing the prefab frozen form. We assume the prize went to whomever thought of making them as described above, arriving as an irregularly shaped blob of shreds on your plate. Though I’ll admit to having some of the prefab rectangles in my freezer.
Scattered, smothered and covered.
There’s a Silicon Valley chain called Hobees that has some great “special” hash brown dishes. My current favorite is “Mama’s Papas”; hash browns topped with with turkey bacon, spinach, mushrooms, Jack and Cheddar cheese.
Nah, it’s the shredding and patting dry part that I find a pain in the ass. Maybe I just need a better grater, and I’m too impatient to make sure they’re all the way dry.
The key to awesome hash browns is the key to an awesome hamburger: Flip once, and don’t press.
There seem to be three different ways I’ve seen them cooked:
- Shredded. Some of the shreds are crunchy and some are soft.
- Chopped potatoes. Not shreds, but many different sizes. Again, some of the pieces are cooked to a crunch, while others are not.
- Individual chunks. Each is browned on the outside.
There are also potato pancakes, which are shredded and fried as cakes.
So here’s one of the classic munchies from my high school days.
Cook a pan of tater tots in the oven, make some chili, pour it over the tots, put all the cheese you can find on top of it and stick it back in the over for the cheese to melt.
You can use chicken nuggets (they have to be the ones shaped like dinosaurs) instead of tater tots.