Recipe analysis — sake/soy potatoes.

I've had this recipe on my del.icio.us bookmarks for so long that the blog it was originally posted on had disappeared, so I had to go hunt it up on the Internet Archive. It turned out to be worth it, partly because it got me thinking about the various steps involved in the recipe, and trying to work out which ones are necessary and what their function is.

• 650g (1.5 lb) potatoes
• 2 tsp groundnut oil
• 300ml (10 fl oz, 1.25 cups) sake
• 3 Tbsp soy sauce
• 1 Tbsp vegan marge (butter works too)

We begin by peeling, cubing, and parboiling some potatoes, before draining them and shallow-frying them. Now, I've made fried potatoes lots of times before, but always previously I've needed to be quite careful about not stirring/shaking the potatoes until they'd formed a decent crust on the bottom. This time, I had no such problems. I wonder if this is down to the parboiling; I suspect that this might have done something to the starch in the outer layer of the potatoes that made them more likely to stick to the interior of the potatoes than to the pan. I made a half-hearted attempt to look this up in McGee, but got distracted.

Next, we pour in quite a lot of sake and let it bubble down and evaporate before adding soy sauce and letting that bubble off too. This stage is to get the flavours of the sake and soy into the potatoes.

Finally, we add butter (I used vegan marge), let it melt, and then use it to get a crust on the potatoes.

It was pretty nice. I'd like to try it with different types of potatoes — the ones I used were quite watery.