If I have bacon grease, I use that to fry potatoes in. I don’t often fry potatoes, and I don’t often have bacon grease, but when I do, the combo is awesome. Better than butter.
You can also make your own by peeling a couple of potatoes and boiling them until lightly cooked. Heat your pan (cast iron works best), add butter/margarine/oil/whatever, and shred your potatoes directly into the pan.
You have to be careful not to over boil the potatoes because, if you do, they will just fall apart when you try to shred them. What I usually do is, if I’m cooking some for mashed, I’ll leave a couple of nice-sized ones whole and take them out of the boiling water about half-way through the cooking time for the ones for mashed.
Overnight in the refrigerator and you can have hasbrowns with your eggs in the morning.
Just because I know how to cook hash browns from scratch doesn’t mean I always do it.
I have a bag of Inland Valley (brand) Simply Shreds in my freezer.
Sometimes convenience trumps “from scratch” and usually I only make mine from real potatoes if I’m out of the frozen or if I’m fixing mashed potatoes anyway and then I’ll boil a couple of extras.
Russets, usually. Yukon Gold work well, also. You want something with a lower moisture content so you don’t end up with a pile o’ mush. Try mixing butter with olive oil (or a neutral oil, if you don’t want the added flavor). That’s what I do for popcorn, as well.
A combination of butter and olive oil. I sometimes use Kroger’s country shredded, too. Most of the time I dice fresh red potatoes small, and halfway through the cooking add diced onion.
There’s the MCDonalds version. I’d usually call that a potato cake.
Dennys makes a very, very good shredded hash brown.
At home we dice the potato’s into small pieces. Fry in a pan with some ham chunks, onion, salt & pepper. Really it’s more pan fried potato than hash brown.