Corned Beef Hash

Plates of corned beef hash (and hash dishes, in general) are an important component of open-faced cuisine. Mom and Dad would tag-team up some CBH on camping trips, or on the occasional weekend morning, and I ... oh, excuse me as I find something to wipe up this drool.

Corned-beef hash differs in anatomy from the prototype presented by JW just last week. In a hash, the meat and carbohydrate are mixed well together. The 'mess factor' comes primarily from egg yolk, and from the hash itself.

Mom always made CBH from a can. Yes, it looks like dog food when it first comes out
(in fact, I'll always remember a scene in '"Where the Red Fern Grows," in which the protagonist is told that CBH is not good enough for his dogs). Once, it's fried up though... with crispy brown bits around the edges, it starts looking like... well, fried dog food. But THEN, you crack some eggs on top of it, cover it and let those eggs cook up, and you have the breakfast of real champions.

Now, the dish pictured above is a little different from your typical CBH. In fact, this is about as high class as CBH gets... . The Brockton Villa restaurant is a good place to get brunch with your parents while in San Diego (La Jolla, no less!). Sure enough, though... that's open-faced cuisine, with FRESH INGREDIENTS! Nice big hunks of corned beef, mixed in with chunks of potato and pepper and topped with free-form poached eggs. Really some of the finest CBH I've had at a restaurant.

That's a peculiar thing about corned beef hash; restaurants are typically really bad at making it. Here is exhibit A.
Who cooks corned beef as patty? And what are the eggs doing all the way over there on the other side of the plate? Let's bring an end to the egg-hash segregation! This dish is from Frank's/Francisco's in Tucson. They do a lot of things right for breakfast. In fact, I love breakfast at Frank's. Just don't order the CBH.

Given how hit-or-miss restaurants are with their CBH, we experiment at home... So, I'll leave you with a success story. We had some leftover trout that had been fried in salt and juniper berries, so we mixed it up with some mashed potatoes, topped with some eggs, and ouila!