Potato Farls (Fadge)
The other Ulster fry bread, and explicitly a leftovers bread - Sunday's boiled spuds become Monday's breakfast. Thrift, not garnish. Fadge is the Ulster-Scots word for the bread; farl is the quarter you cut it into. NOT boxty: potato farl is cooked mashed potato plus flour, while boxty's defining feature is RAW GRATED potato. They are different breads and conflating them is a common blog error.
The other Ulster fry bread, and explicitly a leftovers bread - Sunday’s boiled spuds become Monday’s breakfast. Thrift, not garnish. Fadge is the Ulster-Scots word for the bread; farl is the quarter you cut it into. NOT boxty: potato farl is cooked mashed potato plus flour, while boxty’s defining feature is RAW GRATED potato. They are different breads and conflating them is a common blog error.
Ingredients
- 500 g cooked mashed potato - ideally still WARM, from a dry floury variety
- 100-125 g plain flour (about 20-25% of the potato weight - this ratio matters)
- 25 g butter
- 1/2 to 1 tsp salt
Directions
- Mash the warm potato smooth. Use a masher or, better, a ricer. NEVER a food processor.
- Melt the butter through it.
- Add the flour and salt and bring together quickly - stop the instant it coheres.
- Roll on a floured surface to 1 cm thick. Dust with flour. Cut into farls (quarters).
- Dry pan, medium, about 3 minutes per side, until browned in patches. Much faster than a soda farl - it is thinner and the potato is already cooked, so you are browning it, not cooking it through.
- Serve with butter, or fry it in the bacon fat as part of the fry.
Notes
The two failure modes - different problems, same symptom
Blogs mash these together into one vague warning about “gluey” potato bread. There are TWO independent causes and they need different fixes.
Trap 1 - too much flour. Potato farl is POTATO BREAD, not bread with potato in it. The flour is a BINDER, not the body. Push it up and you get a tough, bready, pasty result. Keep flour at roughly 20-25% of the potato weight. Add the minimum that lets you roll it.
Trap 2 - abused starch. Gluiness comes from rupturing potato cells and releasing free starch. It is caused by OVER-WORKING the mash - made worse by cold potato, and catastrophic with a food processor or blender. Fix: use a dry floury potato (Maris Piper, King Edward, Queens; in the US, russets - NOT red or new potatoes), mash it warm, use a masher or ricer.
Say which one you have before you fix it.
Ulster-Scots variants
- Plain fadge - potatoes, flour, salt.
- Rousel - oats worked into the mixture.
- Sparbled fadge - polenta replacing some of the flour. (The obvious guess is that this connects to famine-relief “Indian meal” maize. It is suggestive and NOT sourced - I am not asserting it.)
See Bread, Soda Farls and Boxty.