Roasties on steroids
What is the ultimate roastie like? Well, it should be crunchy on the outside, and soft and fluffy on the inside.
The Hasselback potato is all that, and more. As you’re dousing it with melted butter, or fat such as goose fat or lard, throughout the cooking time and it’s sliced almost all the way through, it is also incredibly buttery and creamy. Simply delicious!
I’ve seen this dish becoming more and more popular in various fora and websites, and I’m not surprised. Not many seem to know where it comes from, so I thought I’d mention something about that.
The first recipe for a similar dish is in my go-to cookbook for traditional Swedish food – Iduns Kokbok, from 1911. There the potatoes are sliced all the way through and held together by packing them tightly in an ovenproof dish, but it’s in all other ways the same recipe.
In 1953 Leif Elisson, apprentice to chef Rune Erik Lager at Restaurant Hasselbacken in Stockholm, is said to have created the recipe and they’ve been serving it ever since.
Hasselback potatoes
Ingredients
- 8-12 potatoes depending on size
- 50 g butter plus extra for greasing the dish
- salt
- white pepper
- 100 cl breadcrumbs
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 200 °C. Peel the potatoes and slice 3 mm thin slices into them, but not all the way to the bottom. The easiest way to do this is to put the potato in a spoon ad use that to guide you. Place the potatoes in a greased ovenproof dish.
- Sprinkle the potatoes with salt and pepper and finish with breadcrumbs. On each potato, place a knob of butter. Roast the potatoes in the oven for roughly 45 minutes, or until soft inside, whilst dousing them with fat from the dish every ten minutes.
