Most Potato sandwich of all time

Read Time: 8 minutes

Have you ever looked at a potato and thought, “I bet this would make a good sandwich?”

I did once, and then created the most potato sandwich of all time.

What is this sandwich?

This sandwich uses all parts of the potato, the ears, the eyes, the nose, and even the legs to create a sandwich with a big texture and flavor. Starting with a potato bun, all the way through a potato-based sauce, and other components we turn a bunch of Yukon gold potatoes into an exciting sandwich experience.

The process starts with boiling down a whole lot of slices of peeled Yukon gold potatoes and turning some of the slices into crunchy, textural elements then turning the rest into mashed potatoes which can yield ingredients for potato buns, a slightly spicy potato sauce, and a fried potato patty to create this perfect potato sandwich concept.

Sometimes I make silly sandwiches and this is one of those times, but along the way, I will show you 2 or 3 different ways to make potato-focused side dishes—plus a sandwich bun—and share the recipes for each.

Five pounds of Yukon gold potatoes

The full recipe for this sandwich starts with five pounds of potatoes—a big bag of Yukon gold potatoes to be exact. I removed the peels and got right to the meat of the matter. Try to get big slices of peels and do not dispose of them quite yet.

The potato-mashing step

Once all the potatoes are sliced into slices you should boil them all to get each slice a head start on the cooking process. After they are boiled we need to retrieve a few slices to be used in one part of the potato sandwich process and the rest will be turned into mashed potatoes of some sort.

At first, we want to mash the potatoes without any seasoning at all. This may seem counterproductive, but we want to extract some unseasoned, softened and mashed potatoes to be used in our sandwich buns and the potato sauce. After we remove that portion we will be seasoning the rest of the potatoes.

Mashed potato buns

I’ve made potato buns a whole bunch for this sandwich blog but I never really created a recipe that starts with mashed potatoes. Typically my recipes call for potato flour which is just dehydrated potatoes that are ground into a very fine dust.

But, looking at a lot of other potato dough recipes, you can find a lot of dinner roll recipes that start with leftover mashed potatoes. I can imagine a theory where the idea for using, creating, and selling potato flour came from in the first place. At some point, someone learned that potatoes in a bread recipe will absorb water during the whole process which leads to a soft bun with a longer shelf life.

I added some context about using mashed potatoes instead of potato flour to my main potato bun recipe and a bit more detail into the notes section of that tried and true recipe.

Crispy potato skins

Or you can just place them on the table when you serve the mashed potatoes to be used as a crunchy, optional topping.

Spicy potato sauce

Crispy parmesan potato slices

This is the reason that we started our potato process with 1/2-inch thick slices of potatoes.

This is a great side dish if you like crispy potatoes. Because the potato slices used in this recipe are already boiled, the pieces of potato will be tender while the bottom and sides are crunchy and full of parmesan flavor.

Once the potato slices are boiled, they can be stashed in the fridge until it’s time to bake. This means you can pre-boil the potato slices and bake a batch of these parmesan potatoes fresh for dinner a couple of nights in a row.

My recipe calls for cajun seasoning, but you could use any seasonings you want. In one of my test batches, I just used salt and ground black pepper. This is a way to turn one or two Yukon gold potatoes into a texturally interesting and flavorful side dish.

Fried mashed potato patty

We intentionally started this process with unseasoned mashed potatoes so that we could extract potatoes for the buns and the potato sauce. But as soon as that portion has been removed, seasonings and cheese are added and mashed in with the rest of the potatoes. But we’re still not going to add butter, milk, or cream to the potatoes like you would if you were making regular mashed potatoes.

We need the mashed potatoes to be firm with very little liquid in them so that they hold together during the frying process. Don’t worry, they will still be soft and creamy after they get cooked.

After all of the ingredients have been added and the potatoes are fully mashed, put them in the fridge until it’s time to sandwich or at least time to fry up the potato cakes. Chilling down the potato mixture will help to firm up the patties after they are formed.

Carefully move the formed mashed potato patty through the egg and then the seasoned bread crumbs to get them ready for frying.

Two different frying techniques

You can fry these potato cakes in a small amount of oil or in a larger amount of oil. The resulting cake will differ slightly, but they should be fairly similar in the final result.

The best option?

I think the deeper fry method produces a better creamy mashed potato patty. I can also see why you might want to use less oil which simplifies cleanup. But the hassle of cleanup is outweighed by the consistently crispy exterior that we get on each patty. It just works better with more oil.

I wrote my recipe with the more oil/deeper fry method, but just know that you can shallow fry these as well.

Sandwich construction

The most potato sandwich of all time

Here are a bunch of photos of the most potato sandwich of all time. It’s a brown one, that’s for sure. The sandwich also will not win any beauty pageants, but I’ve been told that true beauty is on the inside and that’s also where all the potato is.

I made two different attempts starting with 2 different five-pound bags of potatoes to create this sandwich blog post. That’s why you’ll see different colors of buns in my photos because there were a couple of months between attempts. I think the first one was in June and the second full attempt was just this past week in late August.

The fried mashed potato patty is soft and the parmesan sliced potatoes and potato skins bring a lot of texture to the final potato-y sandwich.

Check back next week

Next week I will be making a new sandwich that probably has ham in it. I’m not sure what sandwich it will be but I bet it has ham. Hopefully, it has ham.