I’ve recently returned from a weekend visit to Northern Ireland for a cousin’s wedding where I sustained myself on Guinness, bread, fried potatoes and meat sopping with grease. Soda bread, bulging pork sausages, chips peas onions and thicker than blood gravy, mashed potatoes, roast potatoes and my favourite – potato farl. Potato farl being fried potato bread which has been shaped into a circle and cut into quarters. Potato bread being a worthy excuse to add more carbs to bread.

It’s a Dennison family tradition to have potato farl for breakfast served with lashings of butter, bacon, eggs, tomato, sausage and brown sauce. Think of it as Northern Ireland’s answer to a Full English, but maybe don’t think it out loud for political reasons.

Potato farl is very simple to make, being comprised of just four ingredients: Flour, butter, salt and mashed potato. One tip I would offer before you dive in and make this would be to keep your dough thin so that it cooks easily and isn’t doughy. I’d suggest under 1cm. If it does end up doughy, refry in a bit of olive oil. Please, learn from my mistakes.

Ingredients:

4 medium white potatoes or 3 large
A pinch of salt
30g of plain flour and extra for sprinkling
4 sausages of any pork variety (I chose ones with apple)
1 tbsp butter plus extra for buttering the farls
Brown sauce

How to:

1. Peel and boil the potatoes until cooked. Drain, add 1 tbsp of butter and mash. Leave to cool.
2. Grill the sausages until cooked and put to one side. Slice diagonally.
3. Add approximately 30g of plain flour and a pinch of salt to the mashed potato and knead briefly until it forms a sticky dough. Shape into a circle about 1cm thick using your frying pan as a guide, then cut into quarters.
4. Sprinkle flour onto the frying pan and fry the quarters on a low heat until speckled dark brown on the outside. Be careful not to burn. Turn over and repeat on the other side.
5. Assemble your stack, buttering each layer of farl then add the sliced sausages and douse with brown sauce.