Pastel de Papa – Argentine Beef and Potato Bake
The Argentine classic: creamy mashed potato with egg yolks and butter over a beef filling with hard-boiled egg and scallions, browned until golden. The closest relative of the British cottage pie, with two differences you can taste.
The mash takes egg yolks. They make it denser and more golden, and they are what lets the surface genuinely gratinate in the oven instead of merely heating up.
And the filling is reduced until almost no liquid is left. A wet filling soaks the mash from below and the bake falls apart as you serve it — hence the insistence in step 3 on reducing.
The furrows you draw with a fork at the end are not decoration: they increase the surface area and are what gives you the browned edges.
Ingredients
- 1.5 kg potatoes, washed, skins on
- 750 g ground beef (beef mince)
- 1 fresh sausage, skinned and crumbled
- 4 egg yolks
- 100 g butter
- 50 ml warm milk
- 2 onions, chopped
- 1 scallion (spring onion), chopped
- 1/2 red pepper, chopped
- 2 plum tomatoes, grated
- 3 hard-boiled eggs, chopped
- 100 ml beef or vegetable stock
- 100 g grated mozzarella (optional)
- Grated cheese, to taste
- Oil, salt, pepper, nutmeg, paprika, chilli flakes and bay
Method
- 1
For the mash: cook the potatoes whole, in their skins, in cold salted water. Once tender, peel them while hot, mash them and work in the butter and the warm milk. Add the egg yolks, the seasonings and the grated cheese.
- 2
For the filling: in a pot with oil, fry the ground beef, the crumbled sausage, the onions, the pepper and the scallion.
- 3
Add the grated tomatoes, the stock and the bay. Cook over medium heat until the liquid has almost completely reduced — a wet filling soaks the mash. Take it off the heat, remove the bay and season.
- 4
Assembling: in an ovenproof dish, spread a base of mash about 1 cm thick. Tip in the beef filling and scatter the chopped hard-boiled eggs over it (and the mozzarella if you like).
- 5
Cover evenly with the rest of the mash. Draw furrows in the surface with a fork to encourage browning.
- 6
Bake at a high 190-200 °C for 25 to 30 minutes until the surface is well browned.