Did you just call me a NOVICE? I’ll have you know I have over 60 episodes of Good Eats on my DVR right now…
You screw up one recipe that should be simple…
Anyhow, all that work is much much more than ia m willing to go through inthe morning. I am not doing anything to anything for 30 minutes in the morning before I even get to cook it. I’ve got 2 small kids and I just want to eat and feed them and be done with it. Sometimes I get all fancy, but it’s generally with stuff I can prepare the night before or have al the ingredients ready to go, like a coffee cake or something.
Commercially produced Lard has a smoke point of 370. Bacon fat, with minimal filtering, is significantly less than that. Considering many of the solids within bacon fat have already been cooked a lot more than the milk solids in butter, you would be much more likely to burn hash browns with bacon fat than butter.
The smoke point of crappy EVOO is over 400. Anything else (like the stuff most people have in their homes) is down around 375. That’s significantly lower than canola, corn, or peanut oil, and only about 25 degrees more than butter.
One of the first things I cooked as a child was hash browns on Christmas morning, and we always used a combination of oil & butter. The butter really helps the browning, but if you want to reduce the amount of milk solids, you can cut it a bit with oil. I know chefs who drop a stick of butter into the oil if they are going to do small batches of deep frying, otherwise it’s hard to brown the food without overcooking it.
I’m not saying you can’t burn the butter. Chefguy is right, you absolutely can. Just keep the heat on about medium.
My sincere apple lojies. You can peel and cut your spuds the night before. Just put them in water and refrigerate and they’ll be ready to rock in the a.m.
Why so complicated? I guess I enjoy my hashbrowns Boy Scout style: 1. Dice a potato 2. Put into a thin layer of hot vegetable oil until the little cubes starts to brown 3. Flip the little cubes. 4. add salt and pepper. If your average 12 year old Boy Scout can do it, you can too!