the great boxty experiment
Boxty on the griddle, boxty in the pan, If you can't make boxty, you'll never get your man
i will be single forever.
ag and housemates are planning a big st patrick's day party for this coming weekend. i said i would make boxty. fried anything goes well with lots of beer, no? all excited, i bought a 10 lb sack of potatoes on friday and googled "boxty." that's where i went wrong. 94,000 hits. argh!
i just called a friend to ask his advice...not because i thought he knew how to make them, but that he knew how to eat them. he said they're little fried balls of potato...the recipes i've seen have been flat like pancakes. ok that didn't help much. but he's right; every family would have their own recipe.
i set out to make my irish latkes. c'mon. that's what they are.
i made less than half of the whole batch. i have the other half of the batter from tonight in the fridge and i will play with it tomorrow night to see what happens. ideally i will freeze them and just reheat saturday afternoon at the party.
potato--> mashed and grated, buttermilk, flour and some baking powder. i threw in some grated onion for good measure. why not? i already had no idea what i was doing. i weighed everything out...
love the box grater...no fingers!
here's my batter. i wound up adding about another 1/2 cup flour after this point.
love that splatter guard
hm. how do they look? they taste nice and greasy, but i don't know if they're supposed to taste like that. they're not burned, but super crispy. soft on the inside. probably another minute would have burned them, though.
i've only had boxty once, with the lovely friend who received my panic-stricken phone call tonight, so i really have no frame of reference.
HELP!!!!
do you know how to make boxty?
do you enjoy eating boxty?
readers! (i know you're there!) please assist!
do you know how to make boxty?
do you enjoy eating boxty?
readers! (i know you're there!) please assist!
Labels: food
posted by emily @ 9:44 PM
4 Comments:
What ON EARTH is boxty? Sorry, I'm not of much help here I guess...
Oops if this is what it is supposed to look like (http://www.boxtyhouse.ie/boxtydishes.php) I am afraid you've got a problem ;) But who says this picture isn't fake? After all it's a commercial picture. Don't you have Irish friends or neighbours that can judge the taste of your boxty?
All right - a culinary crisis pushed me to comment! First of all, I think you should just make something that tastes good (likely anyone at the party would say, "huh, that's not boxty?!?!"). And after some beer, greasy probably will taste good. :)
It does seem like the recipes I'm seeing for boxty include a mix of mashed and grated potato (http://www.boston.com/ae/food/articles/2004/03/10/boxty/) and (http://baking.about.com/od/pancakes/r/boxtypotatopanc.htm), but I wouldn't worry about that either.
So what's your concern? What do you want help with? Too cooked on the outside and too soft on the inside? I think that's what a mashed potato cake is supposed to do. I guess you could make them thinner to begin with and then they'd cook through faster, but if you're going to reheat them in the oven, probably a touch undercooked in the middle is better. Just throw some salt and pepper on them after you reheat them.
One piece of advice - I'd drain them on paper towels, instead of a wire rack to soak up some of the extraneous oil (or did you do that and then move them to the rack? I wouldn't bother w/the rack at all).
PS - for lots of potato pancake chat including some on boxty, you could wade through http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=78879&mode=linear
And you can always dazzle people by pointing out that the name "boxty" comes from the word for "griddle" in Gaelic, "bacus," according to the Oxford Companion to Food. ("dazzle" with etymology? it's sometimes amazing I'm not single!)
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