It’s not hard to find sweet baking recipes that
take advantage of leftover mashed potatoes. But the seasoning complicates
matters: You can’t put last night’s garlic mash into chocolate cake or
doughnuts. Or, at least, you shouldn’t. Casual bread bakers might work their
clumpy potato remnants into flatbreads or country loaves; I bet they’ve saved
the potato cooking water, too. Good for them! But the rest of us want something simpler,
something we’d actually be ready to cook the day after a big feast—something
that could work with any family’s mashed potato dregs, and make them feel new.
Maybe something that would go really well with fried eggs.
I found the solution in cookbook author Bert
Greene’s fritterra—mashed potatoes seasoned and shaped
into a cake, then griddled, like you’ve probably seen before, but with a few
smart improvements. “It was a gift from a taxi driver,” Greene writes in the
recipe’s headnote, “who related it in pieces—each time we stopped for a
light.”
He uses a lot of scallions, but briefly boils them
first—a quick extra step that packs in fresh greenness without the bite of raw
alliums. And to bind the cakes, Greene uses bread crumbs instead of flour
because they don’t go gummy when introduced to liquid and are much more
forgiving. These upgrades make for an altogether lighter than
average potato cake, and therefore a reasonable postfeast breakfast (or lunch,
or dinner)
Serves 4
12 whole scallions, bulbs and
green tops
2 large eggs, lightly
beaten
¼ teaspoon freshly grated
nutmeg
½ teaspoon salt (see Genius
Tips)
Freshly ground black
pepper
¼ cup (15g) fresh bread
crumbs
1½ cups (315g) cold mashed
potatoes
1 tablespoon olive
oil
2 tablespoons vegetable
oil
1.Wash and trim the scallions, leaving about 2 inches (5cm) of green stems. Cook
in boiling water until tender, about 5 minutes. Drain and finely chop.
2. Place the scallions in a bowl. Add the eggs, nutmeg,
salt, pepper to taste, bread crumbs, and mashed potatoes. Mix well.
3. Heat the oils in a large skillet until hot but not
smoking. Shape the onion-potato mixture into patties, using 2 rounded
tablespoons of the mixture for each patty. Fry about six at a time until golden
brown on both sides, 2 or 3 minutes per side. Keep warm while frying the
remaining patties. Serve warm.
GENIUS TIPS
Chop the blanched scallions
finely, or the cakes will break along scallion fault lines as they fry. And
don’t be shy with the heat; searing them quickly helps hold the loose batter
together—this will keep you from adding too many bread crumbs, which, after a
certain point, you will regret.
Depending on what
you’ve already got in your mashed potatoes, you may not need much salt, if any.
If you want to be safe, undersalt the mix at first and fry off a tiny test cake,
then adjust accordingly.
Enjoy these
pancakes for breakfast or use them as a bun for any burger! They can be made
ahead of time and reheated to use within a few days. For a lower-carb option,
make them with shredded carrots instead of sweet
potatoes.
