Potato cakes (fadge or farls)
Irish potato cakes are traditional comfort food, and come under various names and guises. You might hear them called fadge, potato farls, tattie bread, tattie scones or simply “that splodge that I came up with from the leftovers”.
If you’re making your own homemade potato cakes, remember that they don’t have to be just a breakfast dish either. They’re a great accompaniment to a main course, or eat them with tomato relish or chutney and a fresh green salad.
Potato cakes on the griddle pan
To make them you need just three or four ingredients:
- Mashed potato
- Plain white flour
- Milk
- Beaten egg (optional)
- Salt and pepper to taste
The recipe
- Put three handfuls of mashed potato in a mixing bowl, with a pinch of salt, and (optional) some freshly ground pepper
- Add about a handful of plain white flour
- Pour in a large splash of milk (about a quarter of a cup)
- Stir everything around with a spoon or fork so that it’s mixed well together into a firm dough
- Add a little more milk if the mixture is too dry, or more flour if the mixture is a squishy mess
- Meanwhile put a small amount of vegetable oil or olive oil or (if you prefer) melted bacon fat or butter into afrying pan, and warm the oil up till it just starts to sizzle
- Shape the cakes (see below)
- Fry them on both sides for about three minutes in all
The shaping stage can go one of two very different ways, so I’ll go into both of these in a bit more detail…
Method #1 (the eggy way)
Shape a small handful of the dough into a reasonably flat cake.
Dip it into some beaten egg.
Coat with plenty of flour and place gently in the frying pan. Fry on both sides until golden brown.
Method #2 (the preferred method)
This is the non-egg way.
Sprinkle a small amount of flour on your work surface – cover an area about the size of the frying pan you’re using.
Take about two handfuls of the dough, plop it onto the work surface, and sprinkle a small amount of flour on top of it. Either roll it out with a rolling pin, or pat it down gently with your hands until it forms a rough circle.
The charm of your own potato cakes is that they don’t have to be completely symmetrical. You don’t have to do a circle either. A lot of factory-made Irish potato bread now comes as squares.
The dough should be just under half an inch thick, about the thickness of your little finger.
Get an ordinary knife and cut straight lines along the circle’s diameter to make about four, six or eight slices, depending on your mood.
Frying the potato cakes
Carefully lift each potato cake – if you are rolling them out using Method #2 above, they can be right awkward little so-and-sos that stick to the work surface, so gently coax them off with a knife or a fish-slice.
Put each potato cake into the hot pan. Fry for about a minute or a minute and a half until the bottom goes golden brown. Then turn them.
But just before turning them them over, I sometimes drizzle a little bit more cooking oil onto their uncooked side first, just to make sure it doesn’t dry out too much.
Continue frying until the second side is brown. Serve.
What measurements?
Spuds before their wonderful transformation into potato cakes
The above measurements may seem very vague, but that’ s because life is like that. For a start, it will depend on how much leftover mash you have to start with.
And what kind of mash is it? One mash will be wetter or drier than another mash, depending on what kind of potato you start off with, and how floury the spud is.
Then there’s the question of the ratio of potato to flour. How moist do you want the potato cakes to be? The more potato, the softer and moister the cake.
The mass-produced shop variety needs far more flour, in order to be firmer, easier to handle, with a longer shelf-life and a consistency that’s a bit like a rubber bath-mat.
But fresh, ready-to-eat potato cakes are delicate, tasty and can afford to have much less flour – just be careful when rolling them out that they don’t fall apart.
Boxty
I must be honest, though: I prefer to make boxty rather than these potato cakes.
Boxty is slightly more time-consuming because it involves both cooked mash and raw grated potatoes, but the finished cake is much easier to handle when you fry it – it’s far less likely to fall apart.
Boxty is traditionally a northern dish, and there’s many a pub in Donegal where it’s still handed out for free on a Friday night, very salty and making you drink gallons of stout.
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