This was the side that lived in her cast iron skillet. Sliced potatoes, sliced onions, butter or bacon fat, salt, pepper, patience. She called it "fried potatoes." The German tradition calls it Bratkartoffeln — Pennsylvania Dutch families brought it directly from the old country and never let it go.
The whole dish is two ingredients done right. Crispy-edged, tender-centered potatoes shot through with sweet, deeply browned onions. Eat it next to eggs in the morning, next to a piece of fish at dinner, or alone with a jammy egg on top and call it lunch.
She made it simple. The base recipe below is her dish lifted a notch — brown butter instead of straight butter, smoked paprika sharing the seasoning duty, a slivered garlic clove, a finish of sherry vinegar that cuts through the richness and pulls the whole thing into focus. Her exact version follows after.
The third dish in her family canon, alongside the pickled eggs and beets and the wilted lettuce salad.
Serves 4 · about 50 minutes
Ingredients
- 2 lbs Yukon Gold potatoes (waxy-medium starch — the right potato)
- 1 large yellow onion (or 2 medium), sliced ¼-inch thick
- 4 tbsp unsalted butter
- 2 tbsp neutral high-smoke-point oil (avocado, canola)
- 1 clove garlic, slivered
- 1 tsp kosher salt, plus more to taste
- ½ tsp freshly cracked black pepper
- ½ tsp sweet paprika + ½ tsp smoked paprika (pimentón de la Vera)
- ½ tsp caraway seeds (the German move — small but present)
- 2 tsp sherry vinegar (or Banyuls), to finish
- 2 tbsp chopped fresh parsley
- Flaky sea salt (Maldon)
- Optional: shaved aged Manchego or Parmigiano-Reggiano; a jammy 6-minute egg per plate
Method
1. Parboil the potatoes. Scrub but don't peel — the skin is half the texture. Slice into ¼-inch rounds or half-moons. Drop into a pot of well-salted cold water, bring to a boil, simmer 5 to 7 minutes until just barely tender (a paring knife should meet some resistance). Drain in a colander and let them steam dry, untouched, for 5 minutes. This is the step every home cook skips and every diner cook knows — wet potatoes will not crisp, no matter how hot the pan.
2. Brown the butter. Put a 12-inch cast iron skillet over medium heat. Add 3 tbsp of the butter. It foams, the foam subsides, milk solids drop and turn deep amber, the kitchen smells like toasted hazelnut. About 4 minutes. Don't walk away in the final 30 seconds.
3. Add the oil and lay in the potatoes. Pour in the neutral oil — it raises the smoke point so the brown butter doesn't burn. Bring the heat to medium-high. Lay the steamed-dry potatoes into the skillet in a single layer (or close to it). Don't touch them for 5 minutes. Resist the urge to stir. You're building a hard golden crust on the bottom face.
4. Flip, add onions, garlic, last of the butter. After 5 minutes, flip the potatoes with a thin spatula. Scatter the sliced onions over the top. Drop in the remaining tablespoon of butter and the slivered garlic. Season — kosher salt, pepper, both paprikas, caraway.
5. Cook the onions in. Drop the heat to medium. Cook another 12 to 15 minutes, stirring gently every 3 to 4 minutes — not constantly, just enough that the onions don't burn while the potatoes pick up color on new faces. The onions move from white to translucent to golden to deeply caramelized. The potatoes keep darkening.
6. Taste. Pull a potato out, blow on it, eat it. Adjust salt. Maybe more pepper. If the onions need another five minutes, give them five minutes. Caramelization is the entire flavor of this dish, and it cannot be rushed.
7. Finish. Off the heat, hit the pan with the sherry vinegar — it'll hiss and lift the fond. Scatter the parsley. Flaky salt across the top. If you're plating, shave aged cheese while it's still hot so it half-melts on contact.
8. Plate or skillet. Family meal: serve straight from the skillet. Company: tall stack on a warm plate, jammy onion ribbons draped on top, parsley, flaky salt, a jammy egg cracked over the top so the yolk runs into the crispy edges. Same dish, different stage.
Notes from the cook
- Yukon Gold is the potato. Russets turn mealy. New potatoes are too waxy to crust properly. Yukon Gold sits in the middle — creamy interior, crispable exterior. Right tool for the job.
- Parboil and dry. The two-step boil-then-fry approach is the move. Boiling cooks the inside; frying crisps the outside. Trying to do both at once in one pan gives you burned outsides and raw insides.
- Don't crowd the skillet. If your pan isn't big enough, work in two batches. Crowded potatoes steam each other and never crisp.
- Cast iron, every time. Stainless works in a pinch. Nonstick won't get hot enough for proper Maillard. Cast iron is the right tool — and the more seasoned, the better.
- The vinegar finish is non-negotiable for the elevated version. Two teaspoons of sherry vinegar at the end is what takes this from "really good potatoes" to a plate you'd order out. Acid against fat is the trick of every restaurant side dish you've ever loved.
Honoring her exact version
The way she actually made it:
- 3 tbsp butter (or 3 tbsp rendered bacon fat from 4 strips of bacon cooked first, bacon crumbled back in at the end)
- 2 tbsp neutral oil
- 1 tsp sweet paprika (no smoked — that wasn't in her pantry)
- 1 tsp kosher salt
- ½ tsp pepper
- Same potatoes, same onions, same parboil step, same patience
Skip the brown butter, the garlic, the smoked paprika, the caraway, the vinegar finish. Just butter, oil, potatoes, onions, sweet paprika, salt, pepper, and time. That's her plate exactly — and it's still excellent. Some nights that's what you want.
Further moves
- Confit the onions separately. Slow-cook the onions in olive oil over very low heat for 30 to 40 minutes until jammy. Stir them in at the end instead of cooking them with the potatoes. Crispy potatoes against silky onions is restaurant-grade contrast.
- Lyonnaise. The French version of this exact dish — replace half the butter with rendered duck fat, heavy hit of parsley and Banyuls vinegar at the end. Pommes Lyonnaise. Same dish dressed up in different clothes.
- Crispy capers. Pan-fry 2 tbsp capers in olive oil until they pop and crisp. Scatter over the finished plate. Salty briny crunch — chef finish.
- Pair it. Beautiful next to the caramelized miso salmon, or as the anchor of a vegetarian brunch alongside crème brûlée french toast.
Gluten-free
Already gluten-free. Verify your paprika has no wheat-based anti-caking agents (pure paprika is just ground dried peppers). Everything else naturally GF.
GF vegan version
One of the cleanest conversions in the file — butter is the only animal ingredient.
Swaps
- Butter → Miyoko's European-style vegan butter, same volume. It browns. It tastes browned. The best vegan butter on the market for cooking.
- Everything else is already vegan.
For the elevated upgrades
- Lyonnaise direction (duck fat) → refined coconut oil mixed 2:1 with olive oil plus a tiny pinch of smoked salt. Or just more olive oil — the technique carries the flavor either way.
- Crispy capers are vegan as written.
- Aged cheese shavings → Violife Just Like Parmesan wedge, shaved with a vegetable peeler. Or nutritional yeast at the end — different texture, similar umami.
- Jammy egg on top → soft tofu seasoned with kala namak (Indian black salt, tastes eggy). Or skip the egg and let the potatoes carry the plate.
Differences from the original: essentially zero. Vegan butter — especially Miyoko's — behaves close enough to dairy butter in this application that even a discerning eater won't notice once the potatoes are crispy and the onions are caramelized. The dish is fundamentally about technique — Maillard on the potatoes, slow caramelization on the onions — and technique converts cleanly across fats. Honest scoring: 10/10. Probably the most successful vegan conversion in the whole file. Grandma would have been fine with it.