Potato Pancakes with Smoked Salmon Mousse

Start with the potato, because it's the one ingredient people get wrong before they've even opened the recipe. Boiled and mashed — but boiled whole, in its skin if you can manage it, and only peeled after. A peeled potato boiled in water takes on water, and that extra moisture is exactly what you don't want when you're trying to fold in delicate egg white and hold a batter together. Waxy potatoes are worse here too — they're wetter and don't break down into that dry, fluffy mash a baker's mix needs. Go for a floury variety — Maris Piper or King Edward, the ones that turn to powder when you fork them — and let it cool properly before you touch it. Warm potato will cook the egg yolk slightly when you mix them, and warm batter will deflate your whisked whites the second they meet it.

The eggs do two separate jobs and that's why they're separated. Yolks go in early, with the crème fraîche, for richness and a bit of binding — fat and emulsifiers. Whites go in last, whisked to stiff peaks, for air. Stiff peaks means the whisk comes out and the point stands up without flopping over — if it slumps, you've under-whisked, and the pancake will be heavy; over-whisk until it looks grainy and dry, and the structure collapses when you fold, same result, heavy pancake, different route there. Fold with a large spoon or spatula, cutting down through the middle and turning the bowl, not stirring in circles — stirring knocks the air straight back out, which defeats the entire point of separating the eggs in the first place.

Flour and baking powder are a small amount doing a structural job, not a flavour job — 40g flour to 350g potato is barely a coating. The baking powder gives a second, smaller lift alongside the egg white, insurance against a flat pancake if your whisking was a little shy. Don't double it hoping for extra fluff — too much and you get a chemical aftertaste and a pancake that rises too fast and collapses, same as an over-leavened cake.

Butter for frying, not oil — here butter isn't neutral, it's flavour, and it browns at a point well below smoking, which is exactly the colour you want on the surface of these: gold going toward amber, never past it into brown-black, because that's burnt butter solids talking, not the potato. Keep the heat low enough that you can watch that colour change happen slowly — a domestic hob's medium-low, the kind where the butter bubbles gently rather than spits. These are small pancakes with raw-ish batter inside; if the outside colours fast, the inside never catches up, and you serve something gold outside and gluey in the middle. Patience here isn't optional — it's the only thing standing between a cooked pancake and a browned one.

The salmon for the mousse is hot-smoked, not cold-smoked — meaning it's already cooked through, flaky, more like a cooked fillet than the slippery ribbons you get on a bagel. That's why you can mash it with a fork into the mayonnaise and crème fraîche rather than needing a food processor; cold-smoked salmon would turn stringy and unpleasant worked this way. If you only have cold-smoked, chop it fine first rather than mashing. Chives bring a grassy, oniony note without the bite of raw onion, which would fight the fish — if you've none, the green tops of a spring onion, very finely sliced, do the same job. Lemon juice and zest aren't garnish, they're the acid that keeps a mixture this rich from tasting flat and one-note on the tongue; taste as you add it, because lemons vary wildly in sharpness and a recipe can't account for the one sitting in your fruit bowl. Dill and roe on top are there for the same reason a Sunday roast gets a scattering of fresh herbs at the end — a point of brightness and texture against everything soft and rich underneath — leave the roe off without guilt if it's hard to find or not to your taste; it's decoration, not structure. Feeds four as a starter or light lunch, less if you're serving it as a single course after a big roast.