Emerald Isle version of potato pancakes coming to Irish Fest
If you love potatoes (and who doesn’t?), you’ll want to catch visiting Irish chef Pádraic Óg Gallagher in action at Irish Fest this weekend at Maier Festival Park.
Not only is the traditional Irish pancake known as the boxty the mainstay of his 29-year-old Dublin restaurant, but he is himself something of a potato scholar.
Ask him about the 19th-century potato famine, the potato industry in Ireland today or especially, the boxty, and he has a ready answer.
In fact, he wrote his thesis in culinary school about the boxty, a potato preparation peculiar to only a few counties in northwestern Ireland, including County Leitrim, where he was born and raised.
“I grew up on boxty,” he said in a recent phone interview from the Emerald Isle. “On Friday (being Catholic), you had a choice of fish or boxty. The fish there was not palatable at the time, it was smoked haddock. It didn’t take my fancy.” So boxty it was.
The potato pancake, which is prepared in three different ways at his Gallagher’s Boxty House restaurant, dates back to 1750, according to Gallagher. It’s a common error that boxty was a famine dish, he said.
“It was not, because” — insert “duh” here — “we had no potatoes in the famine.”
Gallagher’s affection for boxty and his road to chefdom both began in his childhood in the 1960s and ’70s. His father was a veterinary surgeon, and his family had a farm and a pub.
“I was brought up in hospitality, brought up in farming,” he said. When he finished school, he left home for London, then Dublin, Europe and finally, South America. He got into cooking in the West indies, where he worked on a yacht.
In the mid-’80s he returned to the British Isles and in 1988 opened his restaurant in Dublin’s medieval Temple Bar district.
“My dream was to be open from April to October and then head back to the West Indies to work on the yacht,” Gallagher said. “It’s been 28 years and I haven’t been back.”
That first year, “my partner said, ‘what do you mean you’re going to the West Indies in October? No bloody way — you go talk to the bank manager.’ “
But his earlier travels had already inspired him. In Caracas, watching the Syrians make their flatbread and then add fillings, he vowed to do the same with boxty in his future restaurant.
At the Boxty House, that would be his pan boxty. That version, thin and pancake-like, is filled and made into a wrap of sorts. The most popular is the Gaelic boxty, filled with medallions of beef in a mushroom whiskey sauce. There are also chicken and vegetarian versions.
Boiled boxty are dumplings, traditionally the size of a baseball, but shaped like gnocchi at his restaurant. They are on the heavy side but are “a great conductor of sauces,” he said. “If your sauce is good, it will dance.”
The boxty loaf, finally, is a bread. “We treat that like bruschetta,” Gallagher said. “The dough is kneaded with
some butter, it’s baked about an hour. … We take it out, chill it, slice it and refry it in a little butter. All boxty is best refried in a little bit of butter.”
The boxty base is the same, with slight variations: grated raw potato (with the moisture squeezed out), cooked mashed potato, flour and salt. But amounts are imprecise.
“It’s a touchy-feel thing,” he said. “It’s not an exact science. And it shouldn’t be.”
Besides boxty, his restaurant focuses on foods from artisan producers throughout Ireland, a trend not unique to his restaurant.
This is the chef’s first visit to Irish Fest. He hadn’t been briefed on the fare served by festival vendors, but he said he wasn’t concerned whether it was authentically Irish or some Americanized variation.
“I try to bring my food into the 21st century too,” he remarked.
And he pointed out that one popular food Americans associate with Ireland — corned beef — was never much consumed by the Irish people. Most of it was exported.
In the 17th century, with a very low import tax on salt (and export of live animals to England banned), the Irish brought in the best salt, made the corned beef and shipped it to the colonies, he explained. From North America they brought back rum and flax, the latter leading to the linen industry.
Potatoes, of course, are another story. Before the Great Famine, some 3 million Irish survived pretty much on potatoes alone, Gallagher said. In 1841, four years before the famine began, just under a million hectares of land was planted in potatoes.
Today, that number is 20,000.
“But it’s a huge industry,” he said. “We have a good, successful potato breeding program, we export a lot of potatoes to Africa.”
The Rooster potato, a red potato developed in the ’90s, is the most popular in Ireland today, accounting for 70% of the potatoes consumed.
“It’s an all-around potato, good for chipping, mashing, boiling,” he said. “It’s simple and easy to work with.”
Gallagher himself grows dozens of heritage varieties of potatoes on a rooftop in Dublin. His crop couldn’t begin to supply the 50 tons of potatoes used every year at his restaurant. Instead, he harvests his potatoes in early October and on National Potato Day “invites people around and has a little party.”
Gallagher owns the restaurant with his wife, Colette Smyth. They also have a new brewery, Jack Smyth Stouts and Ales, named for their son. As a result, Gallagher was looking forward to sampling Miwaukee’s craft brews while he’s in town.