Corned Beef Hash New York Carnegie
The Humble Plate of Hash Has Nobler Ambitions
"I WOULD never call myself a meat-and-potatoes guy," said Robert Newton, the chef at Seersucker in Brooklyn, where the country pork hash has a devoted following. "But I really like hash."
Modern meat-and-potatoes lovers, meet hash, your new best friend. Friendly to home cooks and on the upswing with chefs, who make it from corned beef, pastrami, Texas barbecue, leftover prime rib, lamb necks or duck tongues, hash is thrillingly easy to cook and deeply satisfying to eat. (Especially at this time of year, with holiday feasts receding in the rear-view mirror and leftovers lurking in the fridge.)
The essence of hash is meat that's already cooked, potatoes for starch and usually onions for sweetness. A couple of loose-yolked eggs on top provide a sauce that brings all the flavors together.
As meat has become larded with high status, and as diner food is reinvented with culinary credibility, hash is coming up in the world.
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Some purists consider even garlic and parsley too racy for a proudly plain dish, but chefs are becoming brave, adding spice and smoke to pitch the dish a little higher on the palate.
For the gussied-up red flannel hash at Serpentine in San Francisco, the meat-and-potatoes motif is combined with a beets-and-horseradish element to make a zingy, sweet and earthy hash. At the off-cut specialist Lazy Ox Canteen in Los Angeles, lamb neck hash with quinoa and a jidori egg (a fresh, local free-range variety) is on the menu. At Smoke in Dallas, classic Texas barbecued brisket is shredded, mixed with onions and roasted green chilies, and served on a bed of crunchy corn-bread chunks that stand in for potatoes. (Hot sauce on the side is a must.)
Classic American corned-beef hash developed in New England, a breakfast based on leftovers from endless boiled dinners of beef, cabbage, potatoes and onions. Older Midwestern recipes call for binding the hash together with a white sauce of cooked flour, perhaps a clue as to why the dish is remembered with little fondness in those parts. And the canned version that Americans have become accustomed to is strange and sugary, with a meat texture that should not exist in nature.
Plain corned-beef hash, in the right hands, can be a thing of beauty. The New York chef Declan Cass, a native of County Kilkenny in Ireland, says that he hasn't changed his recipe in any particular since he arrived here 20 years ago. "Why would I?" he said, with mystification.
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At his modest restaurant Stove, on an equally modest block of Astoria, Queens, Mr. Cass makes a hash that many consider the best in New York, a title that he wears lightly. It's simple, he says: two kinds of boiled potatoes, diced and mashed. Caramelized onions, present in two forms: sliced, and ground. House-corned beef, purpose-made for the dish. The whole of it mixed together on Saturday night, ready for Sunday morning's brunch rush. "Season it up and let it sit, that's the only secret," he said.
The final cooking step is turning the meat and potatoes and onions together in the pan (or on a griddle), pressing down to make the edges of everything crisp up. The ingredients must be jumbled together — made a hash of. If the ingredients are coerced into tidy separate circles, well, that's not hash. (Chefliness can go too far).
At Northern Spy Food Company in the East Village, the chef Nathan Foot makes a simple but perfect version: his corned beef is spiked with double the usual amount of pickling spices. Even better, he cooks the potatoes destined for hash in oil, not water, so that they never dry out in the pan and brown beautifully without scorching.
At Seersucker, Mr. Newton saves all the savory juices from roasting a whole pork shoulder for his hash. "We take the pan juices and pour all that love back over the meat," he said. "Then it hangs out until brunch the next day." The pan juices are more than ordinary, since Mr. Newton was trained to deploy the Indian spice arsenal at Tabla, and he borrowed from the pastrami tradition in making a toasty, coriander-and-pepper crust for the meat that trickles down into the flavor of the juices. Sudden blasts of spice make the hash interesting; exciting, even. Served with nippy dandelion greens, it tastes like a Southern classic.
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"When I was little, corned-beef hash was what we called midnight breakfast, always a treat," said Katharine Kagel, the chef and owner of Cafe Pasqual's in Santa Fe, N.M., a national landmark for breakfast lovers. Ms. Kagel is not a trained chef, but a quality-mad food lover who opened Cafe Pasqual's in 1979 and has run it since, always with corned-beef hash on the menu.
At the turn of the 20th century, Ms. Kagel said, her maternal grandfather was the finest butcher in Sacramento ("My mother's side is all about meat," she said). Her paternal grandparents sold produce from a stall at the Housewives Market in Oakland, Calif., when it served as a busy railroad distribution point for ingredients headed to San Francisco.
"Those are as good qualifications for hash as any I can think of," said Ms. Kagel, who has refined recipes for both corned-beef and smoked-trout versions at her restaurant. In her view, the most important things about hash-making are keeping the meat moist (in its cooking juices, or liquid, if possible) and waiting until the potatoes are completely cool before grating them.
In his home-cooking book "Ad Hoc at Home," the surgically precise chef Thomas Keller gives instructions for cooking onions ideally for hash: melted but not mush, sweet but not stringy. His meat of choice is bacon, a nice shortcut for home cooks who may not have a haunch of beef around.
The explosive, peppery pastrami hash at the Carnegie Deli in New York is a classic, and so is the prime-rib hash at Keens Steakhouse, which is spiked with Worcestershire and ketchup. When serious chefs get their hands on the dish, the fabulous creations often turn up at brunch, when a heavy, arteries-be-damned hash of fatty meat, butter-cooked potatoes and fried eggs may be proudly served even at upscale restaurants.
For the brunch menu at Hecho en Dumbo in the East Village, the chef Danny Mena invented a chorizo-spiked version of a Spanish icon: huevos estrellados Lucio, a tumble of eggs and French fries made famous at Casa Lucio in Madrid. "Our version is pretty greasy, in a good way, but even so it doesn't do justice to the original," Mr. Mena said.
In an e-mail from Valladolid, Spain, Jesús Miguel García Martín, a food writer who blogs in Spanish at eladerezo.com, wrote that in the original dish, the eggs are barely cooked — just fried a few seconds on each side in plenty of hot olive oil, then plopped on top of hot, greasy French fries. Once the dish is placed in front of the customer, two forks are used to break the yolks and coat the fries in their deliciousness.
"It's like a deconstructed tortilla," Mr. Mena said, referring to the Spanish tapa of scrambled eggs layered with potatoes. It is also, in his meaty, spicy New York version, very much a hash.
Longman & Eagle in Chicago, which GQ's restaurant critic, Alan Richman, termed a "neo-flophouse," serves an elegant, tidy appetizer of beef tongue and black truffle hash. It is made with tiny diced potatoes cooked in duck fat, and topped with a duck egg. In lieu of onions, shallots are roasted overnight at low heat, bathed in clarified butter.
"Hash may be a flophouse dish," acknowledged the restaurant's chef, Jared Wentworth. "But hey, this is the only flophouse in the world with a Michelin star."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/dining/05hash.html
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