But, when I tried to find a recipe to recreate it at home, I came up against a wall of silence: and with no definitive way to cook a rösti, the only thing to do was experiment. Crisp on the outside, soft and meltingly, well, potato-ey within, it was so good it needed no other adornment – although, of course, with mountains to climb, I added liberal amounts of smoked ham and local cheese. Then, this summer, I spent a long weekend walking in the Alps, and I realised that, while the Swiss are apparently incapable of producing even a glass of water for less than a tenner, they do make the world's best rösti. All too often, however, these globalised röstis have an unpleasantly starchy flavour and greasy, raw interior, which makes them a prospect even less appealing than burger bar hash browns as far as I'm concerned. A taste for fried potato, it seems, is universal. That said, I was startled to read on one food blog that despite a year-round average humidity of 84% "most restaurants. While many Swiss consider it their national dish, the world has taken a shine to it too, and it's not as if I haven't eaten a few in my time (most memorably one in the Himalayas that came with a teaspoon embedded in the centre). But frankly, that's the least of my troubles. (In fact, it's even harder, because no one, as far as I can tell, has come up with anything even vaguely resembling a definitive rösti recipe.) The only thing I do work out during my initial research is that I've been pronouncing it wrongly all these years: apparently it's reursch-ti rather than row-sti. In fact, it's almost as if the Swiss want to keep the recipe secret, tucked away in a subterranean vault, as establishing anything concrete about this Alpine favourite, from the type of potatoes used to the cooking method, is a feat akin to scaling the north face of the Eiger. F or a simple peasant dish with just two ingredients – and humble ones at that – rösti is surprisingly difficult to pin down.
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