Don’t Hassel the Back (Hasselback Potatoes)

I’ve always admired chefs with great knife skills – Many of us in our late 30’s can remember when TV Chefs were not as abundant as they are today, and to actually see a cooking show required timing, and possibly a day off from school. One of the personalities was a guy named Martin Yan, who SLAAAAYED the knife skills game. Peep this link right here to see what I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT9lKA5_bPI 

Now imagine you’re a kid who’s starting to learn how to cook and you see this guy bust a carrot down into a stack of nickels without any of them rolling away and just laughing to himself at the end saying ‘DONE!’ – yeah, you damn right you want to be able to cut some shit up like that – that was AWESOME. That was the first cooking show I remember wanting to watch as a kid. ‘Yan Can Cook’ was the show – and he’d say ‘If Yan can Cook, so Can You!’ And I’m sure all the kids my age wanted to chop a carrot down like him, and ended up jacking themselves up, but you didn’t hear about that back then because we didn’t blame other people for our own screwups.

My brother gave me a Shun knife for Christmas one year, The Shun Classic 8″ Chef Knife.

You’ve probably seen it lurking in the background of some of the pictures on here. And I mean that – it is lurking, that thing is out for blood – it loves cutting things – I took a knuckle down to the point of no return with it once, no big deal. I have gotten pretty good with my knife skills – not on Yan’s level, but it takes me well under a minute to cut an onion from ‘starting to peel’ to ‘ultra fine dice’. This blade, bestowedeth upon me by my kindred relative, who haileth from the village of Austin, hath alloweth me to see large sums of culinary quests to their ends! (sorry, was trying to get medieval for you..  sword analogy..  yep sorry)

So you’d imagine my intrigue when I saw a video clip – one of those ‘Tasty’ type videos that show up in your facebook feed – that showed a prerequisite of ‘superior knife skills’. They were called ‘Hasselback Potatoes’..  Challenge was accepted.

First thing you do is select a evenly shaped large potato and wash it down. Then you make slices that don’t go all the way through the potato, or cross into one another, as close together as you can. Some people lay chopsticks down on the cutting board to avoid cutting all the way through, other people just champ their way through it, other people hold their knife at a specific angle so that you stop when the tip of the blade hits the cutting board. I chose option 3, because it made the most sense to me. After making the cuts, you microwave your potatoes for 5 minutes a potato, and let them cool a little bit. Here’s what mine looked like after those steps:

The Shun blade made short order of this work – I ran it on the steel before going at it, and it glided through. People asked me if I had a machine to make the cuts, I didn’t – I promise, no cheating on this one.

The next step is to spread the slices out and fill it with garlic butter and bacon – that was harder than cutting the potatoes believe it or not, but I eventually made my way through it.

I set the oven to 375, and let the bacon stuffed potatoes go at it until I was happy with the done-ness of the bacon. In hind-sight, I could have let them go a little longer, because the potato-chip-like outer areas played an awesome contrast with the inside ‘mashed’ areas, but I was happy with the results.

The next was a sauce – I’ve made cheese sauces before for my smoked macaroni and cheeses, as well as blue cheese sauces for steaks – but for this, I wanted something that was going to basically be like melted cheese, and be able to be drizzled on top. So I started with a rue, added some cream and some pepper jack cheese – then kept adding cream until it reached the consistency I wanted. On it went!

I didn’t have a garnish, but it didn’t need one – my god that was a tasty treat. I’m sure there are tons of recipes online for Hasselbacks-  get out there and give one a try! Get a good knife too! Give that knife a name! No, not Charlene, pick again.

More Yan Can Cook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KRGi17Xg0Y

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