Restaurant Sekel’s Filip Langhoff reveals his family’s favorite dish of early potatoes.
Filip Langhoff offers asparagus, spinach and nettle with early potatoes. Eeva Paljakka
– This is our family’s favorite. The children have been eating it since childhood, says the chef and restaurateur Philip Langhoff while crushing boiled early potatoes with a wooden spoon.
The owner of Sekel, a restaurant located on Helsinki Boulevard, wants to share his own early potato tip. You need freshly boiled early potatoes, butter, salt, olive oil, onion, lemon and dill. The end result is super delicious.
– Early potatoes are the best for this dish, says Langhoff.
And specifically still warm potatoes. According to Langhoff, crushed potatoes work well with fish and grilled food, as well as on their own.
Philip’s crushed potatoes
boiled early potatoes
butter
olive oil
salt
1 small diced onion
salt
juice of half a lemon
chopped dill
1. Boil the potatoes and pour off the water. Mash the potatoes with a wooden spoon.
2. Add onion cubes, butter, olive oil, salt, chopped dill and lemon juice to the potatoes.
3. Mix and eat immediately.
Restaurant Sekel’s name means century. Filip Langhoff says that the food is designed by drawing ideas from the last century. Eeva Paljakka
According to Langhoff, potatoes should always be eaten the same day they are cooked. The refrigerator is not good for the taste of the potato.
– Boiled potatoes should not be put in the refrigerator. The potato starch turns into a paste in the refrigerator and has a slightly metallic taste.
But if there are potatoes left over, Langhoff has a solution for it, which he learned from his own mother once upon a time.
Langhoff’s mother always put herb salt on the boiled potatoes and only then put the potatoes in the fridge.
– A potato salad-style side dish was ready for the next day, with olive oil on top.
Herbamare herbal salt is still used in Langhoff’s home kitchen.
– It has more flavor because there are dried herbs and roots in the salt. It works like a stock cube and gives food umami. Herb salt goes well, for example, on top of tomato slices on a sandwich.
95 percent of the ingredients used in Restaurant Sekel are organic and wild. Majvik’s biodynamic farm from Sipo, which was already Langhoff’s credit partner at the previous Michelin-starred restaurant Ask, supplies Sekel with, among other things, all potatoes, root vegetables and cabbage.
Langhoff swears by organic. He is concerned that the amount of organic products in the vegetable departments of stores has decreased. Of course, restaurateurs understand that increased costs affect consumers’ purchasing power. But according to Langhoff, many organic products are pretty much the same price as standard products, for example flour, milk and eggs.
Mashed potatoes are a favorite food of the entire Langhoff family. Eeva Paljakka
This summer, Langhoff and his spouse Linda Stenman-Langhoff have opened the summer restaurant Segel in Hanko.
The restaurant offers a summer menu with an emphasis on fish, seafood and vegetarian dishes made from fresh local ingredients.
– We are looking forward to returning to Hanko. We both have our roots in Hanko and in our youth we have spent many summers there, Langhoff states.