It Wasn't Chilly in Chile - Back to South America
Aye, aye, aye - all of this travel back and forth between Asia and South America is causing some serious jet lag to my taste buds. Hahaha!
Here we are back in South America on the western coast. I will have to say I was VERY excited to learn that Chileans eat one of my favorite types of pancakes, potato pancakes! Who could ever say no to a fried potato?!? In Chile they refer to potato pancakes as milcaos, and they make their milcaos slightly different than I'm used to making potato pancakes. I was very excited to get started on these! Here are the ingredients for milcaos:
Next put them in a pot of water on the stove, and bring the water to a boil. Once the water is boiling, simmer on medium heat until potatoes are tender. I chopped my potatoes into smaller pieces so that they would cook a bit faster. After the potatoes are cooked, add in the butter and salt, then mash the potatoes well. Set aside to cool. While the mashed potatoes are cooling, begin peeling and shredding the rest of your potatoes. We used the small grate of a box grater to grate ours.
We thought the above picture was an interesting one of the potato peels, so I included it in the blog. Here is what our grated potatoes looked like:
Don't worry if they brown a little bit like ours did. Once they fry up, the color changes again anyway. After you've grated the remaining potatoes, you need to squeeze out all of the excess liquid from them. I do this by repeatedly placing them between dry paper towels and squeezing until I can't get any more liquid out. You can see a picture of a part of this squeezing process in my Chanukah Post.
Now you're ready to mix everything together. We started with mixing half of the mashed potatoes, half of the shredded potatoes, and half of the vegetable shortening together.
Once you have half of it mixed together, go ahead and mix the rest of the potatoes (both mashed and shredded) and shortening in until you have what looks like potato dough. Heat up 1-2 inches of your favorite oil for frying. Once the oil is heated, form potato pancakes with your hands.
Once you've shaped your pancake, place it in the hot oil and fry until edges are brown. Then flip to finish cooking.
While the milcaos are frying, get a cooling rack out and place it over a cookie sheet. You can also take random pictures of your dogs if you have any:
Once the milcaos have cooked on both sides, remove from the oil and allow excess oil to drain off on the cooling rack.
Continue cooking until all of the potato batter has been cooked. In Chile they eat them just like this, but we decided we wanted a little bit of protein with ours. So I rinsed a can of black beans, added a cup of corn, and a container of my favorite salsa (sorry, I don't have the size, but it's just a normal size of salsa you'd buy in the grocery store).
You can eat the black bean salsa as is by itself, but we put it over our milcaos.
Deeeeeeelish!
Here we are back in South America on the western coast. I will have to say I was VERY excited to learn that Chileans eat one of my favorite types of pancakes, potato pancakes! Who could ever say no to a fried potato?!? In Chile they refer to potato pancakes as milcaos, and they make their milcaos slightly different than I'm used to making potato pancakes. I was very excited to get started on these! Here are the ingredients for milcaos:
- 12 medium potatoes
- 3 tablespoons vegetable shortening, at room temperature
- 1 tablespoon butter
- Vegetable oil for frying
- Salt to taste
Next put them in a pot of water on the stove, and bring the water to a boil. Once the water is boiling, simmer on medium heat until potatoes are tender. I chopped my potatoes into smaller pieces so that they would cook a bit faster. After the potatoes are cooked, add in the butter and salt, then mash the potatoes well. Set aside to cool. While the mashed potatoes are cooling, begin peeling and shredding the rest of your potatoes. We used the small grate of a box grater to grate ours.
We thought the above picture was an interesting one of the potato peels, so I included it in the blog. Here is what our grated potatoes looked like:
Don't worry if they brown a little bit like ours did. Once they fry up, the color changes again anyway. After you've grated the remaining potatoes, you need to squeeze out all of the excess liquid from them. I do this by repeatedly placing them between dry paper towels and squeezing until I can't get any more liquid out. You can see a picture of a part of this squeezing process in my Chanukah Post.
Now you're ready to mix everything together. We started with mixing half of the mashed potatoes, half of the shredded potatoes, and half of the vegetable shortening together.
Once you have half of it mixed together, go ahead and mix the rest of the potatoes (both mashed and shredded) and shortening in until you have what looks like potato dough. Heat up 1-2 inches of your favorite oil for frying. Once the oil is heated, form potato pancakes with your hands.
Once you've shaped your pancake, place it in the hot oil and fry until edges are brown. Then flip to finish cooking.
While the milcaos are frying, get a cooling rack out and place it over a cookie sheet. You can also take random pictures of your dogs if you have any:
Once the milcaos have cooked on both sides, remove from the oil and allow excess oil to drain off on the cooling rack.
Continue cooking until all of the potato batter has been cooked. In Chile they eat them just like this, but we decided we wanted a little bit of protein with ours. So I rinsed a can of black beans, added a cup of corn, and a container of my favorite salsa (sorry, I don't have the size, but it's just a normal size of salsa you'd buy in the grocery store).
You can eat the black bean salsa as is by itself, but we put it over our milcaos.
Deeeeeeelish!
Comments
Post a Comment