hello this is chef john from food wishes comma with baked potato puffs that's
right they said there was no way to do a big version of these famous french fried
potato puffs which go by the name pom dolfinh but you know what I think we did
and for the record I'm just assuming that's what they said I mean no one's
ever reached out to me directly but I'm pretty sure someone said you can't do
these in the oven and you know what if those people do exist they were just
proven wrong but anyway let's go ahead and get started by making some mashed
potatoes which I'm going to do by simmering some Yukon Golds and some
salted water for however long it takes for them to get very tender but not
falling apart okay if we cook these too far they're gonna absorb water and our
puffs might get too heavy okay we're making puffs not lumps so we're gonna
want to be testing that with a knife and when they are in fact very tender
without falling apart we'll go ahead and drain those and then mash them which I'm
just gonna do using this regular potato masher all right if we were in culinary
school they would make us use what's called a ricer which is basically a
press that has a screen and you push the potato through and it's nice because you
don't get any lumps and if you have one in you're feeling fancy go ahead and use
it but just a regular masher like this will totally work and then once that's
mashed what we're gonna need to do is absolutely nothing okay just simply set
that aside while we move on to make the other major component which is believe
it or not the exact same dough we used to make cream puffs and eclairs no I'm
not kidding so what we're going to do is bring some
water and butter and a little pinch of salt to a boil over medium heat and as
soon as our butters melted in that starts to bubble we'll go ahead and stir
in some flour and then using a wooden spoon what we'll do is cook this for a
few minutes still over medium heat until it
basically pulls together to form a dough and all that stuff should pull semi
cleanly off the bottom and a few minutes later if everything goes according to
plan you should end up with something that
looks like this and once that happens what we'll do is transfer that into a
bowl and kind of spread it out a little bit because we want to let this cool for
about five minutes or so so it's not too hot for the next step which would be to
mix in one whole egg which is you can probably see I beaten ahead of time
because it does mix in a little better that way and I'm gonna go ahead and mix
that in with a spatula and in case you're wondering yes I do usually use a
whisk which does a much faster job but once it comes together I'll get stuck
inside the whisk and you have to use a spatula anyway to get it off so I
figured I would save a step and while we'll take a little bit longer
eventually if you keep smearing and smashing mix it in mashing eventually
you should end up with a very very soft very sticky dough and once that's been
accomplished we are now ready to mix our two components so we'll go ahead and
take exactly one cup of our mashed potatoes and add it to our pot tissue
which I believe is the French name for that dough and we'll go ahead and mix
that with our spatula until well combined and I should mention you can
change the ratio between potato and dough depending on what kind of texture
you want to end up with okay with less potato you're gonna end up with
something that's a little bread here more like a fritter or maybe like a
potato flavored donut whereas with a higher potato concentration you're gonna
end up with something that's more like a deep-fried mashed potato which by the
way is what I prefer but anyway we're gonna go ahead and give that a mix which
one we're gonna give it a taste for seasoning because even though there's a
little salt in the dough and we cooked our potatoes with salts we're probably
gonna need some more so I did add some more salt as well as a little shake of
cayenne plus a very small but possibly very important grating a fresh nutmeg
okay just a little touch mostly down or the traditional palm dolfinh recipe and
we'll go ahead and give that one last mix and by the way if you were gonna add
something like crumbled bacon or green onions or chives or something like that
this would be the point you do that all right I'm just showing you the basic
chords here you have to write your own song so feel free to accessorize this I
mean you guys are after all the bots of your mashed potato tots and that's it
once everything's mixed together we are ready to cook these which traditionally
would mean scooping this into a deep fryer but we're not doing that
as you may have heard we're gonna bake these so I went ahead and scooped those
into a very well buttered mini muffin pan and I was really hoping this would
work because generally baking is a lot easier than deep-frying so I went ahead
and scooped those in and I was thinking about giving him the old tappet abba but
I didn't I left those as is and then I headed to the oven where I pop those
into the center or sort of the center of a very half 450 degree oven for about 20
minutes or until they were golden brown and puffed and looked like this so at
this point I was very happy with how they looked but I was kind of scared
they had stuck but much to my delight they did not and they actually came out
very easily and as I was lifting these up transferring them onto the cooling
rack I really was amazed at how light they felt I'm talking feather-light so I
thought that was a really good sign and I couldn't wait to try one but I did for
a couple minutes okay we don't want to eat things that
are so how we can't taste him so I left those cool for about five minutes
before breaking one open so you could see what was going on and what's going
on is this a super light airy fluffy mashed potato encased in a buttery
golden-brown crust all right what part of that doesn't sound like something you
really want to eat and they really did taste and feel every bit as good as they
looked so I think the name potato puffs really fits
although mashed potato top would be pretty good too and then as far as
serving these I think there's a lot of different directions we can go and right
here I'm serving them with a green chili aioli which is nothing more than my
famous green chili pesto mixed into some mayonnaise and yes I should probably
show you how to make green chili pesto but anyway that made for an absolutely
spectacular dip for these warm puffs and since I'm gonna need all of these I can
totally double dip if I want so as far as doing these as a warm snack or
appetizer they definitely passed the test but I
also think they would make a great and very interesting breakfast potato next
to a couple fried eggs and in the spirit of full disclosure I fully admit I'm a
mashed potato fanatic and loved any and all kinds so I knew I was gonna love
these I just didn't realize how much so these really did work well with the eggs
and the dip but these were also make for a great side dish for something like a
steak which is basically what the original fried recipes used for speaking
of which I did save a little bit of the batter so I could show you what these
look like fried and while I did want you to see the difference not enough to
actually get my deep fryer out and do correctly so as you can see I'm just
shallow frying these in a little bit of oil for a few minutes at let's say 375
until nicely browned and while the insides gonna be pretty much the same
whether you bake these are deep frying the outside is definitely gonna be
darker and crispier and I would have done the fork scrape but these were too
small so then I tried rubbing one on the rack but that didn't work so you'll just
have to settle for the sound of me biting one and like I said the outside
is gonna be a lot crispier although these could used another 30 seconds
since these were still a little bit underdone in the center nevertheless I
still enjoyed those very much and they really are amazing fried which is
something to keep in mind if you're one of these families that likes to deep-fry
their turkey I mean you're already gonna have a big vat of hot oil so why not but
anyway that's it how to make the classic palm dough Fein whether you end up
deep-frying them or baking them in the oven if you like mashed potatoes and you
like puffs I really think you should give these a try soon so head over to
food wishes dot-com for all the ingredient amounts of more info as usual
and as always enjoy
you