I had one of the great breakfasts of my life a few years ago on San Juan Island, north of Seattle, in a waterside coffee shop that served commercial fishermen, hippie farmers, kayak tourists and boat builders in equal measure. The grated hash browns there were cooked in thin sheets and run under a broiler beneath a handful of grated cheese to create crisp pancakes that could be used as a platter on which to serve fried eggs, or as a hat to top them, depending on your mood. When I got home to New York, I started making them for dinner as well as breakfast, as a side dish for steaks or chicken or lamb. It was labor-intensive to make the dish and ultimately annoying because one of my children wanted it all the time. So together we worked out a hack.
Eventually that hack became a recipe, and eventually that recipe became something else again. Recipes change over time, if you make them enough. Recipes change in response to experience at the stove and, if you’re lucky, because of experiences you have out in the world, eating and thinking. So I no longer grated the potatoes but cubed them. I no longer fried them in clarified butter but roasted them in the oven, slicked in bacon fat. Were there onions in the dish I ate on San Juan, or bell peppers? I can’t remember. Both are there now, for sweetness and color alike.
My potato hash now recalls the potato skins you can get in cheery sports bars, scattered with chopped scallions that offer astringency against the sweet and salt. It suggests the potatoes served in big discs at steakhouses in New York — Pietro’s in Midtown, say, or late night at one of the Palms — hard-crisped at the edges.
And lately my hash has taken on some of the aspects of a dish I ate on a covered deck last month outside Two Sisters Bakery in Homer, Alaska, a pull-apart cheesy bread with some of the same crisp-soft-fat-flavorful aspects of the potatoes I had on San Juan, though in Alaska drizzled with a fiery sauce and topped with a delicate nasturtium flower. Carri Thurman, the chef and an owner of the bakery, covers soft dinner rolls with bacon and cheese, tomato and kale and caramelized onion, then douses them in sriracha mayonnaise. It was the softness of her dish that amazed. I wanted that for my potatoes at home.
And so I cranked the heat in the oven. It crisped the exterior of the potatoes while leaving their interiors pillowy soft. And I whisked together sour cream, lime and minced chipotles en adobo — canned chipotles, though in a pinch you could use ground dried chipotle powder — to create a sauce of smoky intensity, fiery against the potatoes, bacon, onion and peppers. The combination made for a perfect bar-snack appetizer, a bed for fried eggs, an accompaniment to seared steak. It looks nothing like what I ate on San Juan. And its flavor outstrips my memory of the original.
But it is still sort of the same dish, just as it is sort of the same as a dish made in Alaska out of dinner rolls instead of potatoes. This is all of a piece: deliciousness born of one inspiration and changed by another, and then another.
Omit the bacon if bacon’s not your game, and replace it with a couple of tablespoons of butter. Increase the amount of bacon if you like, particularly at breakfast. Omit the red peppers if you don’t like them. Add yellow ones, or green, or jalapeño. Make the chipotle sauce with mayonnaise instead of sour cream, or with yogurt. Serve the finished dish as a slab out of the oven, or as a beautiful mound. Indeed, make the recipe entirely your own. The point is simply to aim for a thick, caramelized crust of potatoes with interiors soft and sweet. That is your canvas. You can paint on it whatever you like.
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