French Friday with Dorie: Matafan

This week's French Friday with Dorie recipe is one that I am very familiar with, although we called them simply potato pancakes. My dad was a meat and potatoes man and so we ate mashed potatoes pretty much every night when I was growing up and mom would often make potato pancakes just to vary things a bit. 

I like the word Matafan instead of referring to them as mashed potato pancakes, don't you? Mat is short for matin or morning and fan is what the word faim sounds like, meaning hungry. They were eaten to stave off the rumbling and roaring sounds that your stomach makes when you are hungry. I sure wish I had eaten some of these before my meeting on Tuesday morning. 

Dorie's recipe is a lot more involved and more work than my mom's recipe though. Instead of using leftover mashed potatoes, you bake some potatoes in a pan of kosher salt to draw the moisture out of them for 1-1/2 hours in a 400 degree oven. I used some gold potatoes I had on hand and instead of the russet potatoes that Dorie suggests in the recipe and because I made these last night after work, I put them on a plate covered with kosher salt and popped them in the microwave for about 13 minutes. The salt really did draw out the moisture in the potatoes.

What's also interesting about this recipe is that you whip the whites of 2 eggs until stiff peaks form and then fold the whites into the potato batter which is supposed to make them fluffy, but my mom's were just as fluffy and she never separated the eggs and whipped some of the whites. I served my matafan as a dinner side dish and topped them with some sour cream and snips of green onion. This isn't a side that I would normally choose to serve with chicken mole, but it worked and I think they were tastier with the gold potatoes.

Be sure to check out the rest of the groups' links over at French Fridays with Dorie. You can find Dorie's Matafan recipe here.