On swedes and perfectionism
Root vegetable rösti topped with sichuan spring onions or classic poached eggs
Serves: 4
Preparation time for rösti: 15 minutes preparation, 45 minutes in the oven; plus a further 10 minutes for poached eggs or spring onion toppings.
Note: this week’s post has a number of pictures so it may be easier to read on the website.
Ingredients
Rösti
200 g swede (1/4 of a large Swede)
200 g waxy potatoes (2 medium, 1 small potatoes)
150 g carrots (2 carrots)
1 large shallot
1 clove garlic
2 t sunflower oil
1 T balsamic vinegar reduction
1/2 lemon
1 egg
pepper, salt
Optional topping no 1: Sichuan spring onions
2 bunches spring onions (scallions)
sunflower oil
1/2 t sichuan peppercorns
1 t black peppercorns
1 t sriracha or mild chilli sauce
1/2 t miso paste
1 t soya sauce
20 g peanuts (optional)
1/2 sliced fresh red chili pepper (to garnish)
Optional topping no 2: Poached eggs
1 fresh egg per person
white or cider vinegar
chopped curly parsley, good olive oil, pepper, dried chili flakes, sliced fresh red chili pepper (to garnish)
Method
Heat oven on bake to 180°C/350°F. Grease a tray, choosing one that looks bigger than you need so that the rösti can be spread out thinly. (Mine was 36cm x 12cm. You could also cook the rösti in a large frying pan if you have one that goes easily into the oven).
Make Rösti: Dice shallots and chop garlic. Sauté on a low heat until tender (around 10 minutes). Partway through, add a squirt of balsamic reduction to caramelise the shallots.
Meanwhile, grate potato, swede and carrot with a box grater. No need to peel anything. Squeeze a little lemon juice over potato to prevent it oxidising. Place potato and swede into a teatowel and squeeze out excess liquid. Then combine all grated vegetables in a bowl with caramelized shallots and one egg if using. Mix well, season. Press into greased tray. It should be no more than 2 cm thick, or you will need to cook it for longer. Drizzle over olive oil; sprinkle over sea salt.
Bake rösti in oven for 45 minutes until the edges are crispy and the vegetables are well cooked. Approximately ten minutes before it will be ready, make topping.
Option one: make sichuan spring onion topping. Chop two bunches spring onions, leaving some longer pieces for texture. Cook in frying pan with a little sunflower oil for 5 minutes, until collapsing. Using mortar and pestle, crush the peppercorns and sichuan peppercorns slightly (but do not grind to powder). Add to the spring onion, along with the other ingredients. Cook for a further 5 minutes. Serve atop the rösti, garnished with sliced fresh red chili pepper.
Option two: make poached eggs. Boil water, add white wine/cider vinegar and salt, reduce to a gentle simmer. I find it easiest to poach eggs in a large pan and not to crowd in too many at once. Remove with a slotted spoon once the white is cooked (but the yolk is still liquid) and place on top of the waiting plates of rösti. Garnish with: chopped curly parsley, olive oil, pepper, dried chili flakes and sliced fresh red chili pepper.
The story behind the recipe
The first time I remember making rösti, or something approximating it, I must have been fifteen. I had invited my grandparents for dinner and I was going to cook. As children, we ate at their house all the time, often on a Sunday for lunch after church. My Grandmother would cook, while my Grandfather disappeared into his study or the large workshop that adjoined the garage, washing the grease off his hands before coming to the dinner table when he was called. Theirs was a traditional division of labour, though he always did the dishes afterwards. This was one of the few times I can ever recall them coming to our house for dinner. I had scoured our family collection of 80s cookbooks looking for a good recipe and settled on rösti for reasons that I now cannot explain. I had never made it before, I had no concept of what a rösti even was, but I suppose perhaps I thought that since we always had a large paper bag of spuds under the sink, at least it didn’t require many ingredients.
The main thing I remember was how long it took to peel and grate enough potatoes for all of us, seven in all, and by how wide a margin I had underestimated how long it would take to cook. And I remember the look of shock on my Grandfather’s face - a look he quickly tried to hide - as he came through the backdoor into the kitchen, saw me hovering anxiously over a frying pan and realised that we were having potatoes for dinner. Potatoes were not dinner. Potatoes were a side, to be eaten with boiled peas, gravy, one or other type of meat. One could not have dinner without meat. By this stage, I had decided that I would try to cook the rösti as smaller fritters in the hope it would speed up the cooking process. I had not parboiled the potatoes, I had only one cast iron pan on an agonisingly slow electric stovetop, and I was trying to turn the raw grated potato into magically crisp fritters for seven people by a mere sleight of hand. In the end we must have eaten them half raw with ketchup, that I do not remember. Perhaps there was also a salad, or we opened tins of baked beans in desperation. No doubt my grandparents went home to eat a second dinner of weetbix and brown sugar, my Grandfather’s go-to dessert.
That was the first of what would be many kitchen catastrophes with rösti. For years, it continued to elude me. But I have a stubborn streak. Since starting this newsletter, I have tried to make some version of rösti or latkes at least six times. The same evening I created the rainbow carrots in raddichio bowls that became the first post in this newsletter, I also tried to make a perfect rösti. The carrots were going to be a salad on the side. I know, it seems crazy that I thought I could pull a rösti out of the bag just like that for the first post, but cooks are nothing but optimists. I did not pull a rösti out of the bag. It was an unmitigated disaster that was consigned to the compost bin. Luckily the carrots didn’t turn out so bad.
I kept trying. I bought beautiful red potatoes when we were in Scotland, determined to nail a rösti once and for all. I tried twice. I wanted a crackling, crisp shell-like exterior with a softer interior that did not even vaguely resemble mashed potato. This was not a hashed brown. It needed texture, interest. Each time it was soggy, deflated somehow, heavy with onions, sodden with oil instead of crisping up.
This week, I decided to cook something with swedes, which we found at the market. Swedes are an unassuming root vegetable. They are not a usual vegetable for us. I couldn’t even tell you whether turnips were the same thing as swedes (turns out they are not, though they are closely related). The only recipe I knew involving swedes was Meera Sodha’s Swede Laksa, which I had once cooked and found a bit sweet. My mind wandered inevitably towards rösti. Maybe I could make a swede rösti.
So I tried again. I read The Guardian’s “perfect” recipe for rösti, and was suspicious of the claim that parboiling was better, so I decided to cook one version with raw vegetables and one with parboiled. I watched a youtube video of a real Swiss woman cooking a rösti and thought, how hard can this possibly be. I read a Dutch recipe for rösti that gave the instructions “make 2 large röstis” as if it was nothing more complicated than boiling an egg, as if every Dutch person knew from birth how to make a rösti. I made one in a tray in the oven and the other on the stovetop. I varied the ratios of potato to swede.
Friends, they tasted like failure. Neither of them were cooked through, even after 45 minutes. My quantities were off, the layer of vegetables too thick, there were too many other things crowding into the oven also wanting to be cooked. The one with the par-boiled potatoes was pale and mushy, the other had too much texture. I had been in the kitchen for hours. We ate late. Plastic containers of unwanted rösti piled up in the fridge. Perhaps there was a reason that no-one puts swede in rösti.
Write about this, says the one I love, sitting across the table from me, trying to find the words to encourage me while also giving honest feedback. Hearing criticism is hard, but giving it is hard as well. Write about failure in the kitchen, he says. Write about how this recipe keeps defeating you. I can’t do that, I say, that’s embarrassing. People won’t take me seriously. Everyone has mishaps in the kitchen sometimes, he says, that’s the only way we learn, the only way we improve. I sigh, go to bed despondent, wondering if this whole project is a colossal waste of time.
Then it is a new day. I get up. I join my road-cycling club for the first ride of the season, though it is 2 degrees and frosty out. I come home and make myself a rösti for lunch. I make it from the memory of a rösti we once cooked, in those long-distance days when, at the end of a Sunday, I would take a train back to Paris and go back to my solitary life. That long ago rösti was a late lunch eaten in the same sunny lounge where I am now writing this newsletter, marvelling at how much better my life has become. Today’s rösti takes me an hour from start to finish. I top it with a poached egg. It is sweet and tender and has some crispy bits on the outside and some caramelized shallots inside to turn it from something very plain and ordinary to something quite plain and a little more interesting.
This isn’t the perfect rösti. I honestly don’t know if such a thing exists. This is a good enough rösti that you can make with whatever root vegetables you have to hand. It aims for the fulcrum point between perfection and creativity; between elaborate techniques and simplicity. The Swiss may parboil the potatoes and chill them overnight in the fridge and then stand sweating over a stove for 45 minutes cooking a rösti in a frying pan. But raw, grated vegetables in the oven works almost as well and for a fraction of the effort.
Here’s to being good enough. Thanks for reading.
Amelia.