Ingredients:
A few potatoes... nice big ones not those that have their skin already cleaned and are small... something like those inthe pic below:
Skin them and place them in a bowl of salt water... use a lot of the salt... it's not for taste... will explain later:
Grate them. I used a food processor with a grating attachment to speed things up a little. You can hand grate them if you wish, but it will take a long time!
Once grated, put them back into the salt water. And soak them for 20 minutes. The reason for using salt water is to extract the startch from the potato. Indeed, after about 20 minutes, there is a pretty thick layer of starch at the bottom of the bowl; be careful not to stir the whole thing or you will get glue! You will hardly taste any salt on the final product actually.
During the 20 minutes wait, I went to wash the food processor. After 20 minutes, the water should be quite thick, remove the potato shred and rinse them and queeze out as much water as possible. Hot frying pan plus water equals very bad idea and a lot of smoke. It will look and feel a lot like buangkuang (turnip) the stuff in popiah. Like that:
Now is the fun part. Melt some butter or heat up some oil in a pan. Grab a handfull of the potato and throw it into the frying pan. Spread it out into a cake that is about half a centimeter thick. Shake the pan quite vigourously so that the potato doesn't stick to the pan. Do this until the top is a little translucent; then you will know the bottom is quite cooked.
Now you have to flip it. Takes practice, I will advice watching cooking shows on how this is done. These pictures were taken during my fourth attemp at making rosti (or hashborwns or whatever), had quite a bit of failures is trying to flip the whole thing. Managed to get it right this time round. You need to jerk the frying pan foward and up; hopefully the rosti will leave the pan; fly up, make a complete flip and rest back into the pan nicely. Just cook until the bottom is nice and brown as well. The finished product should look like that:
So a little hard work can save you quite a bit of money at Marche... the $7 you pay there for the food can probably make about 20 of these at home! The amount of potatoes shown made about 4 of those cakes. Can serve plain or with mustard and sour cream.
