Craving Rösti
Food editor at large and potato freak Marjan Ippel has no reason to complain. After all, we’re currently living through a potato boom. Well, more of a fries bubble. But once the smoke has cleared above the deep fryer, we’ll discover that there’s much more you can do with potatoes. Like making rösti.
The fries market is almost saturated. And even the British pub staple jacket potato has undergone a haute-cuisine makeover. Fried potatoes are still mainly a home-cooked dish, apart from a few excellent spots such as Amsterdam’s Rijsel.
Reusjti
But for rösti (pronounced: reusjti), we really do have to either cross two eastern borders or head into the kitchen ourselves. Because you’ll find this Swiss comfort food in restaurants here even more rarely than those fried potatoes (except at Rijsel’s little sister Scheepskameel).
Rösti: a grated-potato pancake fried golden brown in butter.
The national dish of the German-speaking part of Switzerland is nothing more, but also nothing less, than a grated-potato pancake fried golden brown in plenty of butter. What’s not to like?
Half-and-half
And whether those are cooked or raw potatoes, or perhaps half-and-half, I’m not sticking my fingers into that debate. The Swiss can’t or won’t give a definitive answer, although it is whispered that rösti really must be made with cooked potatoes. Fine, but I prefer them raw.
Raw or cooked potatoes? I’ll take mine fried from raw.
One of rösti’s appealing qualities may well be all the things you can put in, on or alongside it. A poached egg, for example, whose luscious yolk gets soaked up by the potato cake. Or fried bacon bits (then: Emmentaler Rösti). Or, very classically, Zürcher Geschnetzeltes — strips of veal and veal kidneys in a cream sauce.
Rösti joint
Originally, rösti was a farmers’ breakfast in the canton of Bern. An idea? An all-day breakfast spot full of rösti with different Beilagen?
