Westfälische Potthucke – Traditional German Potato Cake with Sausages

This is a traditional recipe from a region called Sauerland in Westphalia. In earlier times, this potato dish was actually a meal for the poor because it’s made mostly with potatoes, and they wouldn’t need many additional ingredients. A typical side dish would have been sugar beet syrup or applesauce and pumpernickel, a regional type of black bread. These sweeter items would balance out the savory taste of the cake.

Potthucke literally means “what sits in the pot”, as this dish used to take hours to be prepared. Not so long anymore!

Ingredients:

8 medium potatoes (1200 g)
1 cup sour cream
4 eggs
2 Bratwursts
salt, pepper, nutmeg to taste
a sprig of rosemary
100 g diced bacon (optional, see the tip below)

Preparation:

1. Peel the potatoes, boil and mash 3 of them, set the raw ones aside.
2. Grease the loaf baking pan or line with parchment paper, leaving excess paper hanging over the sides for easy removal of the finished cake. Preheat the oven to 200°C.
3. Roughly grate the 5 remaining raw potatoes.
4. Knead the grated and cooked potatoes together with the sour cream, eggs and a few generous pinches of salt, pepper and nutmeg.
5. Add a half of the dough to the prepared baking pan. Put the sausages on top of the potato dough side by side, keeping them slightly apart. Cover the sausages with the rest of the dough.
6. Bake for 50-60 minutes. Cool before removing from the pan, either by turning it over or carefully taking it out with the parchment paper. Then cut into slices.
7. You can either eat it straight away, or reheat slices by frying them in a pan until brown and crispy on both sides.

Tip:

Alternatively, you can use 100 g of diced bacon to replace the sausages. Mix them into the dough at step 4 and proceed according to the recipe.