Guinness Rosti

This dish is pretty self explanatory in terms of pure awesomeness. Let's just go down the ingredient checklist: garlic, check. potatoes, check. rosemary, check. guinness, check. Those ingredients in any combination would be deadly-good, but especially great when cooked crispy in rosti form. You may notice that most of the potato dishes I do have garlic and rosemary in them. So what, I like the taste. Make your own cooking blog if you want to do it differently.

Here's what you need:

Potatoes. It isn't a carrot rosti, after all. I like russets. One big one per person.
A whole head of garlic, roughly peeled.
Fresh sticks of rosemary
4 Cans of Guinness
Olive Oil
Sea Salt/Black Pepper

Here's what you do:

1) Preheat the oven to 450. Pour yourself a pint of Guinness from a can. Cans of Guinness are better than bottles, due to the nitrogen widget inside. You get a nice dense and delicious head.
2) Cut up your potatoes into matchstick size pieces. Yes, this can be time consuming if you don't have a mandolin slicer, but just get them all roughly the same size, and not too think. Taste always trumps aesthetics. Feel free to drink your Guinness while cutting.
3) Put your skillet on the stove and turn it up to about 3/4 heat and add some olive oil. When it gets hot enough, throw all your potatoes in, including all the individual cloves of garlic (whole) and a bunch of rosemary stripped off the sticks. Pour in a bit of Guinness into the mix and make sure it gets all up in there. Add salt and pepper. Stir it up!
4) Let this wonderful mixture fry up for 10-15 minutes until the potatoes start browning and getting softer, stirring constantly.
5) Put skillet in oven for 25 minutes.
6) Drink rest of first pint of Guinness. Pour another one.
7) When your rosti starts getting a bit golden brown on the top, after the 25 minutes is up, take it out, wrap a damp cloth around your hand and press down the rosti all over. Be careful, don't burn yourself. You can really compress the rosti any way you like, with a plate that fits, if you have one, or whatever.
8) Put it back in the oven for another 25 minutes.
9) By the time you take it out, it should be nicely crispy and brown on the top and perfectly soft and tasty in the middle. Cut it up like a pizza and serve!

This is really a great meal. Although it takes about an hour to make, its darn well worth it. Especially when watching football, and doubly handy that you have the Guinness there to keep you busy during the downtime. Yum.

Enjoy!