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Hi, my name's Daniel Grurnert, executive sous chef here at Som Saa in Greenwich Village. And today, we'll be showing you how to make the most interesting potato dish. This potato dish is called potato. 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 is going to be this Yukon Gold and we're going to use it to make our pomme purée. Pomme purée is a fancy way of saying mashed potato. And you'll see that inside of the 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 purée. And they're going to boil for around 30 to 40 minutes just until they're buttery soft. You can slide kind of right through it with a cake tester so we know the inside is very tender and soft and ready to be peeled and mashed. The potato, how it kind of came about is Aris Kim, our managing partner and part owner, thought
it would be kind of funny to have a dish on the menu called 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 gets 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 palm 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 tammy. 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 of 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 hard 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 going to kind of pour it right into those molds. So now we're going to 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 Bud. He's kind of our little mascot. He lives right up here, kind of watch over everybody enjoying the potato. These are the molds that we use to shape our potato. That's a silicone molds. We can pour it right in. We can freeze them and they pop out perfectly. This batch here is going to 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 going to 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 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 going to take them upstairs to get that second potato done.
The second potato here is going to be in the form of potato starch. It'll coat that outside of the palm puree to kind of seal it in so when it fries it doesn't ooze out. We take our palm 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. Chip off the excess and go right into the sourdough breadcrumbs. And sometimes when we have
bread left over from our dinner service, we'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 Robo Coupe. So now we're ready for part three of our potato. 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 going to go crazy in the fryer. And it's going to 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 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 shredded potatoes. We pop 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 strings, 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.
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°. 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 going to 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 going to 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. Then these potatoes will go again for about 2 and 1/2 3 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. This potato and 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 going to give us a nice background of this deep umami filled flavor that you'll find that's going to 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°. 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 going to 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. 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 [snorts] and 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. 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 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 going to take about 10 to a 12 g, 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 thought 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 purée nice and hot here. You can kind of crush down. You can hear how crunchy it is. And let's take a little test here. Perfect. It's a very nice crispy outside. Reminiscent of almost potato chips. The inside, perfectly hot. Very silky pomme purée. 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 like potatoes and kind of take that first bite and just think to themselves, "Wow, I didn't know potato could be this good."
