How NYC's Best Potato Dish is Made

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Hi, my name's Daniel Gronert,

executive sous-chef here at Somssi in Greenwich Village,

and today we'll be showing you

how to make the most interesting potato dish.

This potato dish is called potato, potato, potato.

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What makes this the best potato dish

is that you have an ultra-creamy mashed potato in the center

and a very crispy potato around the outside,

sitting in a luxurious miso hollandaise sauce

with a mound of caviar on top.

It's kind of like a McDonald's hash brown on steroids.

The first potato for our potato, potato, potato

is gonna be this Yukon Gold,

and we're going to use it to make our pomme puree.

Pomme puree is a fancy way of saying mashed potato,

and you'll see that inside of the potato, potato, potato.

These potatoes we try not to peel ahead of time.

We find that if you peel it,

it kind of keeps and soaks some of that water

that's used to make the boiled potatoes.

The Yukon Gold we find is very perfect for this application

because of its medium starch content

and high moisture content,

which will help kind of bind the dairy that we put into it,

the milk, the butter, the cream,

and will result in a much less gluey pomme puree.

And they're gonna boil for around 30 to 40 minutes,

just until they're buttery soft.

You can slide kind of right through with a cake tester

so we know the inside is very tender and soft

and ready to be peeled and mashed.

The potato, potato, potato,

how it kind of came about is Ahris Kim,

our managing partner and part owner,

thought it would be kind of funny

to have a dish on the menu called potato, potato, potato.

So now our potatoes are peeled.

They're still quite warm,

which will help us break down the potato

through this food mill here.

The potatoes kind of get sucked down into the bottom,

kind of creating this little vortex here,

and it'll all get pressed down

to give it a nice, smooth consistency.

Every single day, there's an element of this potato dish

that needs to happen,

whether it's the cooking, the making of the pomme puree,

the breading of the potato, the wrapping,

it's potato day every day.

So then we'll take this kind of rice potato mixture

that we just passed through the food mill.

We'll place it all on top of the tamis.

This will help us get a nice smooth texture on the potato,

as well as catch any kind of residual lumps

or potato skin that might have gotten milled down into it.

So now here that we have these slightly warm potatoes,

you can see the texture of it.

It's quite smooth, it's quite soft already.

This is with nothing added, it's just the potato itself.

And we're going to go ahead

and slowly incorporate about a third at a time

the dairy mixture into it while whisking it.

It's quite important

to work with the potatoes while it's warm,

as well as the dairy.

The colder it gets, the more kind of gluey

and harder to work with it'll become.

So the reason why we kind of wanted this creamy

is essentially to when you cut open the potato,

you kind of have this nice, luxurious, soft

and sometimes also oozing potato mix

coming out of this cage of potato, if you will.

For this potato here, once the dairy's all incorporated,

we'll go ahead and throw all of our butter in here,

which it's not for the faint of heart,

but it sure makes a great mash.

This one's just unsalted cultured butter.

Now you'll start to see this mash

go to a pretty soupy consistency.

Very nice for us as we're gonna kind of pour it

right into those molds.

So now we're gonna go in with our salt and white pepper.

The salt for sure helps season the whole potato.

I personally enjoy white pepper more

specifically with potatoes.

I think it complements it very well.

I think black pepper can get a little too harsh,

while white pepper plays in really nicely with the potato.

Once everything is fully homogenized in the potato mix,

it'll have a nice thick kind of luxurious consistency to it,

in which case we'll know it's ready

to be poured into the molds.

This is Spud. He's kind of our little mascot.

He lives right up here

to kind of watch over everybody enjoying the potato.

These are the molds that we use to shape our potato.

It's a silicone mold.

We can pour it right in, we can freeze them,

and they pop out perfectly.

This batch here is gonna yield us

about anywhere from 95 to 105 potatoes.

It's super liquidy.

We'll take this, we'll smooth them out,

get each mold filled here.

We're just gonna slam it on the table a couple of times

just to ensure there's no air bubbles

or pockets that haven't been completely filled with potato.

The reason why we put these in the freezer

is so they can firm up,

they can develop this nice kind of trapezoidal shape,

and it'll make it so much easier

for us to bread and wrap the potatoes.

These potatoes we did the other day

and we popped them out of the molds already.

This is kind of what they look like.

Little chocolate bars, little gold bars, if you will.

We're gonna take 'em upstairs

to get that second potato done.

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The second potato here

is gonna be in the form of potato starch.

It'll coat the outside of the pomme puree

to kind of seal it in so when it fries, it doesn't ooze out.

We take our pomme puree here.

They've been popped out of the silicone molds.

We'll go ahead and give it a nice coating of the starch,

give this a little bit of a tap

to kind of free up those clumps.

Otherwise, those clumps will kind of turn

into this gluey mess,

and it's not very pleasant to eat.

Dip it into our egg wash, which is just eggs.

Drip off the excess

and go right into the sourdough breadcrumbs.

And sometimes when we have bread left over

from our dinner service,

it'll go ahead and cut it up into smaller pieces.

We'll dehydrate it to get it nice and crispy and crunchy

and then kind of break it down in the Robot Coupe.

So now we're ready for part three

of our potato, potato, potato.

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The russet potatoes we found work really well

for the outside spiralized potato

because it has a very low moisture content

and it has a little bit of higher starch content

than the Yukon Golds.

And because it has such a low moisture content,

it's not gonna go crazy in the fryer

and it's gonna get wrapped around that potato.

Once it's fried, it'll kind of act like a cage,

kind of trapping all that pomme puree inside,

as well as it'll create a nice crispy exterior

of potato strings.

We mix our water with a chemical

known as sodium acid pyrophosphate.

And actually, funny enough,

McDonald's uses it for their French fries.

And what it helps do

is it prevents oxidation of the potatoes.

So we can keep the potatoes in water overnight

and the water won't turn red.

It yields a much better finished product as well.

So this is our trusty spiralizer. It's been through a lot.

We have a new one,

but we're not taking it out of the box yet

until this one completely falls apart.

So it kind of creates these really long strands of potato

that you'll see here, almost like potato hair.

And the longer they are, the better they are for us

and they'll be great for us to fry later on.

We'll take these breaded potatoes.

We've popped them back in the freezer

so just so they can firm up a little bit.

They're again easier to work with.

And then we'll take some of these here, potato strands,

kind of start from one side

and work all the way down, just go all the way around.

We'll try to cover it so that all you see

is the kind of potato strings on top.

Once we've wrapped the potatoes

with our spiralized russet strands,

we'll then quickly freeze them

just so the outside potato can freeze up a little bit

and firm up so they're not all waving around in the fryer.

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We'll take a few potatoes,

drop them in each one of our baskets

and we'll just go ahead and lower them in.

We're frying in just plain canola fry oil.

Initial temperature is around 370 to 380 degrees,

and we'll drop these frozen potatoes in.

What that'll do is that'll kind of lower

that oil temperature.

On these potatoes, we're gonna go ahead and do a double fry.

So that first initial fry

is to kind of set kind of a baseline of the color,

but more so since it is frozen,

we're trying to have that initial fry

bring everything up to a reasonable temperature.

We'll pull it out, we'll rest it.

And then the second fry is gonna ensure

kind of more even coloring

as well as the inside getting nice

and consistent temperature.

They've rested for a few minutes

and we're ready to drop them back in.

And then these potatoes will go,

again, for about two and a half, three minutes.

So now that we've pulled these out of the fryer,

they've completed their second fry

and they are ready to be plated.

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This potato, potato, potato dish

is plated with this miso hollandaise sauce

that you'll see on the very bottom of that plate.

We'll add in these core ingredients:

water, sugar, and salt with a little bit of white pepper,

the lemon juice, our egg yolks here.

This white miso paste is gonna give us a nice background

of this deep umami-filled flavor

that you'll find that's gonna be a little bit different

in most hollandaise sauces.

This is our brown butter here.

It's already been heated up to about 155 to 160 degrees.

This one is going to get slowly streamed

into our mixture here

to kind of help emulsify everything together.

This is a super labor-intensive dish

and funny enough, this is gonna be the one thing

that we kind of cheat a little bit on.

Once it's at the proper thickness and viscosity,

we'll just go ahead and strain it right through our chinois.

And this is going to be the base

of that miso hollandaise sauce

that we'll then put into an iSi canister,

very commonly found in restaurants.

You can put any kind of liquid in here.

We charge it with these little guys.

We use nitrous oxide for it. We'll charge it twice.

It'll release all the gas in the air

into the base that we put it in,

and it'll kind of create this luxury,

very light, foam-cloud-like sauce.

And we'll give it a nice vigorous shake,

then this will be ready for service.

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This dish, it comes together pretty quickly.

There's only a few components.

They all play a pretty prominent role though.

So first off, we'll start with the miso hollandaise.

We keep it warm in this iSi canister,

and we'll go ahead and pipe some down

onto the bottom of our plate here.

Once we have that down, we'll have some of these cut chives

and we'll just sprinkle some right on top.

Gives it a nice pop of color.

It also cuts through some of the richness to this dish.

We'll then add the potato

right in the middle of the fluffy cloud sauce

and the chives.

And then the final touch,

we're using a golden Ossetra caviar to finish right on top.

We're just gonna take about 10 to 12 grams,

quenelle it nicely.

And quenelle is this fancy term.

It's a football shape

and we'll just kind of push it back and forth

between two spoons to kind of create the shape.

So when we first though of this potato, potato, potato dish,

we wanted to add kind of another luxury element to it

to kind of bring this humble potato to the next level.

That's our potato, potato, potato.

What I like to do

is I kind of like to smash this beautiful quenelle

and kind of destroy it,

but kind of evenly disperse all the caviar.

I can cut right into the middle here.

This pomme puree, nice and hot here.

Can kind of crush down. You can hear how crunchy it is.

And let's take a little test here.

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Perfect.

It's a very nice crispy outside,

reminiscent of almost potato chips.

The inside, perfectly hot,

very silky pomme puree, beautifully seasoned.

The miso hollandaise adds a nice bright lemony effect to it

and the caviar is just kind of the cream on top.

This is kind of where we started, the humble potato

and we've taken it through quite a journey

to get to this stage,

and it just kind of showcases what you can do

to something as maybe as boring and as humble as the potato.

And for this dish specifically,

I want them to have that kind of first bite

and be transformed, whether it be through nostalgia

or just because they really, really like potatoes

and kind of take that first bite

and just think to themselves,

Wow, I didn't know potato could be this good.

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