Musical hash browns

Hash browns can be lovely, but also the direct opposite. It totally depends on where you have them, what people consider to be hash browns and how they have been made. Strangely enough they can be very different, to the point where they only have potatoes in common and sometimes not even that.

Once upon a time my mum made something hash brown-like, but if I recall correctly, they were patties of plain shredded potato. She didn't do it often enough for me to learn how to make them and I can't remember her adding anything but potato, but she may have done. She called them rösti and I thought that was the same as hash browns. I was probably wrong.

Imagine my disappointment when I had a greasy piece of pressed potato in a McDonald's breakfast meal. Hash brown? Really? That was nothing like mum's version and I found it terrible in every way. Perhaps I had got it all wrong. Maybe hash browns were meant to be like this and if that was the case, I didn't like them at all.

Off to America we went last year and we ate out a lot. Everywhere we went, there were breakfast menus featuring hash brown. No thanks, no thanks and no thanks for two weeks. On the very last day I decided to be brave. Oh my! This was something totally different and I had been seriously missing out due to being a stubborn chicken. On my place was a pile of rather wet and gooey shredded potato, mixed with onion and cheese. It was divine. How come it was the opposite of what McDonald's called hash brown? Very confusing.

During one of my recent ventures into the depth of Pinterest, I came across a hash brown recipe, that didn't look anything like the McDonald version, but not like the American one either. In fact, it looked like mum's rösti. Considering that I liked those, I decided to try. There was a big difference though. They weren't made with potatoes.

This is where the musical part of the meal will become clear. The shredded potatoes was swapped for cabbage. As I try to reduce the amount of potatoes I eat, I liked the idea of a swap, knowing perfectly well what result the cabbage would have. For four days I was a walking one-man-brass-band, but it was worth it. The musical cabbage hash browns were lovely and I will definitely make them again. 

Reading the recipe, I realised that eggs were used as glue. I'm sure mum didn't have any eggs in her rösti, so what she made was probably not hash browns at all. This recipe suggested salt, pepper and onion powder, but I decided to add chilli powder as well. Because I love the sambal oelek chilli paste, I figured that the dry version would be equally good. It was.

Half a head a cabbage, two onions and six eggs made eight large hash browns. They were filling and one was enough for me when served with a piece of meat and sweet corn. Luckily they kept overnight in the fridge and were just as nice when warmed up in the oven the following day.

1. Get the ingredients out. 

These were the ones listed in the recipe: cabbage, eggs, onion, salt, pepper, onion powder and oil.

Here is the chilli powder I used.

2. Add the eggs, salt, pepper and a fair amount of onion powder to a bowl. Whisk to a smooth batter.

3. Slice the onion as finely as you can.

4. Add the onion to the whisked eggs.

5. Shred the cabbage.

6. Add the cabbage to the egg and onion mixture and season with chilli, should you want an extra kick. Leave it out if you prefer the hash browns plain.

7. Mix well until all cabbage and onion have been coated with egg and seasoning.

8. Fry the hash browns in a little oil in a frying pan. Stir the mixture in the bowl every time to make sure you get plenty of egg glue on each hash brown.

9. Flip them over when they have turned golden.

10. You can either serve straight away or gather them on an oven tray with greaseproof paper and keep them warm in the oven while finishing off the trimmings.

11. Serve and enjoy.

We had our hash browns with venison fillets and sweet corn. Yes, a drop of gravy would have been nice, but I was keen to find out what the cabbage delights were like on their own. Very nice, but I was pleased that I opted for chilli in this batch. Without the kick, they would have been a bit boring. Did I miss potatoes in the mixture? Not for a second. Cabbage rocks!

I'm now playing with the idea of swapping potatoes for cabbage in the mixed root hash brown casserole I made a while back. It was a whole oven tray dish and it featured bacon as well. If I remember correctly, everything was shredded, mixed with whisked eggs and cooked bacon pieces, then baked in the oven for half an hour. I served with traditional trimmings when we had guests and there wasn't a crumb left of the casserole after breakfast. Let's turn our guests into a brass orchestra next time the visit.