Potato Cakes Recipe with Smoked Salmon, Sour Cream and Chives - Blogtastic Food (2024)

April 26, 2019 by Nicolas 22 Comments

Crispy grated potato cakes that are much easier to make than your regular potato cake. Not only that, I am going to show you how to make these potato cakes gluten-free!

The perfect appetizer or side right here ladies and gents. And let’s be honest, when it comes to vegetables, it’s very hard to beat a potato. Especially when they’re prepared in a way that allows them to go so nice and crispy.

Which begs the question, how did I prepare them? Well, allow me to explain.

Did you grate the potatoes?

I most certainly did!! I am aware that the traditional way to prepare them is to boil them and mash them up instead. However, grating the potatoes is so much better in my opinion for 2 reasons.

1. Grating a potato is much easier than peeling, dicing, boiling and mashing a potato. The process of this potato cake recipe is as simple as washing the potato, grating it, squeezing out some of the liquid, mixing some egg and flour through the potato then frying the potato in small disks until golden brown on each side.So it’s a much easier process that requires less work, time and cleaning up.

2. Also, I think that potato cakes that are grated are just better because the bit’s of potato develop so much more colour and texture as you fry them. I absolutely love it when the edges go all nice and crispy.

Now, as I briefly mentioned earlier, when you grate a potato and many other vegetables to make something like savoury cakes and fritters, it’s always a good idea to squeeze out some of the water content that the vegetable holds. Just so the mixture doesn’t get too soggy.

You don’t have to spend hours doing this, but just spend a good minute getting rid of that liquid.

And because we want to get a nice colour on the potato cakes, we want to fry them over high heat. Which is why I chose to fry them using a nice light oil with a high smoke point. You can fry them in butter if you want to make these potato cakes extra fatty and delicious, but since butter can burn easily, I would fry the potato cakes in a mixture of both butter and oil.

This is exactly what I did with the hash browns that I made, and if you want to check out the recipe post for those hash browns, click the link or the image below.

What is the difference between hash browns and these potato cakes?

It’s funny, I actually saw a lot of “hash brown” recipes on the internet, and they were made much like this recipe. Mixing eggs and flour through the grated potato to bind and help stabilise mixture as you cook it. And honestly, I would argue that this process doesn’t create hash browns, it creates potato cakes. Which is wonderful don’t get me wrong, it’s just not a hash brown.

A hash brown in my eyes doesn’t involve eggs or flour, it’s just the grated potato. From there you can add whatever herbs or spices you want, but I don’t use any stabilisers or binders to make a hash brown. I rely on the frying process and the starch in the potato to help bind it, but a hash brown doesn’t need to be as well bound as a potato cake. However, it does need to have that delicious, satisfying crispiness.

What if I am gluten-free?

You add gluten-free flour instead, it’s that simple. Gluten-free flour is much lighter and fluffier so you will get a lighter and fluffier result in your potato cakes. Whereas plain flour is a little denser. You can see the subtle difference in the image below.

I would not say that 1 is better than the other, but they’re just different. And I still thoroughly enjoyed them. Although to be honest, with this recipe, there isn’t much of a difference.

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If your a fan of potato dishes, perhaps you’d like to check out my guide on how to cook potatoes.