Beef and Potato Croquettes

Ingredients
1/2 lb ground beef
1 lb potatoes
3 eggs
bread crumbs, unseasoned
oil for deep frying

Cook ground beef. If beef is too fatty, drain off half of the grease. Boil potatoes until soft then mash them until they are free from lumps. Mix cooked beef with the mashed potatoes. Scoop a handful of the mixture and compress into a patty. Beat the eggs with a bit of water to make a egg wash. Coat all sides of the patty with the egg wash, then into the bread crumbs. Heat the oil til hot. Deep fry the breaded patties until golden brown. Drain on paper towel.

Note: The grease is needed to help bind the potatoes together. An 80/20 blend should work best without draining off the grease. Also, you should be using regular old breadcrumbs, not panko breadcrumbs. This is because you can not get an even coating with panko. They are too flaky to coat the patty very well.

Note: 7-21-07: Used 85/15 ground beef and added all of the beef and grease to the potatoes. Potatoes were also mashed fine. I also used a hamburger press to even out the thickness of the patties. It worked out real well. However, the mixture is very soft and crumbly. So I put the patties in to the freezer until I could work with them without them falling apart. It worked but some still fell apart as I dipped them in the egg and breaded them. Perhaps next time, I’ll add a few eggs to bind the mixture better since just the beef grease alone isn’t enough.