Helzel potatoes – a childhood favourite

Soft, fluffy, savoury potatoes baked under a layer of delicious helzel stuffing. This comforting winter recipe is a great accompaniment to almost anything!

Apparently, I made a mistake about Spring’s arrival. It’s gone back to being FREEZING, and the wind seems to have come here from somewhere in the arctic. It actually sleeted on me yesterday. Ugh. 

Any excuse…

However, it does give me a good excuse to make amazingly delicious, cosy, comforting, helzel potatoes.

Delicious, warming stodge is just about all I crave when the weather is cold and vile. I’ll certainly be enjoying these delicious spuds a lot before Spring actually arrives. Hopefully properly, next time.

Helzel – a traditional Jewish food

Helzel is a very traditional Ashkenazi Jewish food. It’s a simple mixture of fat, onion, flour and matza meal. Traditionally it was used to stuff the neck skin of a chicken (or goose), hence the name helzel – a Yiddish word for neck that derives from the German word hals (also meaning neck). 

Helzel is very similar to that other traditional stuffed Ashkenazi delicacy – kishke. However to make kishke the stuffing is inserted into an animal’s intestines (sometimes called derma) before cooking. It’s so similar in fact that helzel is sometimes referred to as falsa kishke or ‘false’ kishke!

Both chicken neck skin and beef/lamb intestines fell out of favour around the mid 1920s with the introduction of synthetic sausage casings. Traditional helzel also suffered as kosher butchers began to sell chickens ready prepared – without their heads and feet – so the neck skin was no longer available. (My Grandma used to recall taking a live chicken in a shopping bag on the bus to be shechted (slaughtered).)

Fortunately for us, the delicious stuffing lives on! The term ‘helzel’ is now used to refer to the stuffing, rather than what surrounds it. It is most commonly used to stuff chicken, or else simply cooked and served alongside. 

(If you want to learn more about the history of helzel, kishke, and other Ashkenazi Jewish delicacies, I strongly recommend investing in a copy of the awesome Encyclopaedia of Jewish Food by Gil Marks. I have spent many a happy hour browsing its pages.)

Helzel potatoes – a family recipe

When I was little, my Mum used to make helzel potatoes – soft, fluffy pieces of potato baked in the oven under a layer of delicious helzel stuffing. Mum cooked it in a red enamelled casserole pot with a lid. The potatoes became deliciously soft and the helzel fluffed up during cooking. Then Mum would remove the lid for the last part of cooking, and the dish would become golden and crispy and delicious on the top. Mmmmm.

When I was around 10, we took part in a car boot sale to clear out a load of stuff from home. Mum put the red enamelled casserole pot in with the stuff to sell. We asked her what she was going to use to make helzel potatoes, and I suppose she must have had some idea of another suitable pot. Or maybe she didn’t. Either way, I don’t really remember her making them after that. No red pot, no helzel potatoes. Sadness.

Craving comfort food

Recently, I found myself longing for these delicious helzel potatoes again. Deeply savoury, with lovely contrasting textures, they are a wonderful winter comfort food. These spuds also score points because you can make them ahead of time and leave in a pre-set oven to cook. Perfect.

The fat in my Mum’s original recipe is schmaltz – rendered chicken fat. Obviously, not being a meat-eater, I substituted something vegetarian instead. I considered using butter, which I bet would have tasted amazing. However, since I have been thoroughly indoctrinated with the Jewish dietary laws, which prevent mixing milk and meat products, the idea of using butter in helzel was completely unacceptable! Even if my version wasn’t going anywhere near an actual chicken. 

Ingredients to make helzel potatoes

Helzel potatoes require just a few basic ingredients. Somehow the slow cooking merges everything into something super cosy and delicious! To make a batch yourself, you will need:

• Potatoes – of course!
• Hot vegetable stock – or you can use chicken stock if you don’t mind about keeping the potatoes vegetarian
• Plain flour – also called ‘all purpose’ flour
• Matzo meal – ideally a medium coarseness but any will do
• Ground black pepper
• A small onion
• Vegetable oil – or you can use schmaltz if you’re not vegetarian

Practice makes perfect helzel potatoes

I made these helzel potatoes a couple of times before I perfected the recipe. You will need more liquid than you imagine, and also more topping – my first batch used only half this amount and it really wasn’t adequate.

This version of the dish is pretty darn close to the one I remember from childhood, and is totally delicious. Even DH, who is not normally a lover of traditional Jewish foods, was quite taken by it. And my daughter Kipper couldn’t decide if she liked the potato or the helzel more. A success all round!

Serves 4.

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📖 Recipe

Helzel potatoes

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Soft, fluffy, savoury potatoes baked under a layer of delicious helzel stuffing. This comforting winter recipe is a great accompaniment to almost anything!

5 from 6 votes

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Prep Time 20 minutes mins

Cook Time 1 hour hr 30 minutes mins

Total Time 1 hour hr 50 minutes mins

Course Side Dish

Cuisine Jewish

Servings 4

Calories 300 kcal

Ingredients

 

US CustomaryMetric

 

1x2x3x

• 1 kg potatoes
• 200 ml hot vegetable (or chicken) stock
• 80 g plain (all-purpose) flour
• 25 g matzo meal
• ¼ teaspoon ground pepper
• 1 small onion
• 3 tablespoon vegetable oil

Instructions

 

• Preheat the oven to 190°C (375°F).
• Peel the potatoes, rinse, and cut into smallish dice – around 1.5cm (¾ inch). Place the cut up potatoes in an ovenproof casserole dish with a lid.
• Pour the hot stock over the potatoes, and set aside.
• To make the helzel, mix the flour, matzo meal and pepper in a bowl. Peel the onion, then grate it on a coarse grater. Cook the grated onion in the vegetable oil in a small pan for a few minutes until soft and beginning to brown, then add to the dry ingredients. Mix well – the mixture should clump together into moist crumbs.
• Sprinkle the helzel over the potatoes and stock in an even layer. Put the lid on the pot and bake at 190°C (375°F) for around an hour.
• Remove the lid from the pot, reduce the oven temperature to 180°C (350°F), and bake for a further 30 minutes to brown the helzel.
• Serve and enjoy!

Nutrition

Nutrition Facts

Helzel potatoes

Amount per Serving

Calories

300

% Daily Value*

Fat

 

1

g

2

%

Saturated Fat

 

1

g

6

%

Polyunsaturated Fat

 

1

g

Monounsaturated Fat

 

1

g

Sodium

 

216

mg

9

%

Potassium

 

1108

mg

32

%

Carbohydrates

 

67

g

22

%

Fiber

 

7

g

29

%

Sugar

 

3

g

3

%

Protein

 

8

g

16

%

Vitamin A

 

113

IU

2

%

Vitamin C

 

51

mg

62

%

Calcium

 

38

mg

4

%

Iron

 

3

mg

17

%

* Percent Daily Values are based on a 2000 calorie diet.

Keyword onions, potato

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More delicious Ashkenazi Jewish recipes

If you like ‘classic’ Ashkenazi Jewish dishes, how about easy vegetarian cholent, or delicious lokshen kugel. And if you can’t get enough helzel, what about vegan gantze tsimmes with a helzel topping?

More fabulous potato recipes

More delicious potato dishes for you to enjoy include everyone’s favourite rosemary & garlic scalloped potato roast, yummy roasted baby potatoes with mushrooms and onions, and wonderfully comforting leek and potato kugel.