Raggmunk.

Name: Raggmunk (Swedish Crisp Potato Pancakes)
Prep time: 20 min
Cook time: 30 min
Total time: 50 min
Yield: 4 servings
Cuisine: Sweden
Ingredients: 120 g plain flour; 400 ml whole milk; 2 eggs; 1 tsp fine salt; ¼ tsp ground white pepper; 800 g floury potatoes, peeled; 80 g butter, for frying; 400 g lightly salted side pork or thick-cut streaky bacon, in 1 cm strips; 6 tbsp lingonberry jam

Swedish Crisp Potato Pancakes

Raggmunk · say it: RAGG-munk

Raggmunk sits somewhere between a pancake and a potato rösti, and the batter is what makes it Swedish rather than Swiss. A thin, crêpe-like mixture of flour, milk and egg is stirred through a mountain of coarsely grated raw potato, then ladled into foaming butter and fried until the outside is crisp and freckled and the potato inside has just turned tender and slightly sweet. It comes to the table with fried strips of salted pork and a spoonful of lingonberry jam, so each mouthful runs crisp, salty and sharp in that order. It is cheap weekday food, it takes twenty-five minutes, and it is better than it has any right to be.

Jump to the recipe

Read the story

Swedish Crisp Potato Pancakes

Gate: Sweden
Prep: 20 min
Cook: 30 min
Total time: 50 min
Serves: 4
Status: Easy
Nutrition / serving · estimated: Calories 690 kcal; Protein 22 g; Carbs 55 g; Fat 42 g; Fiber 5 g; Sugar 14 g; Sodium 1150 mg

Why this recipe works.

Batter first, potato second — the correct order, which keeps the flour from clumping around wet shreds.
Uses the potato starch instead of discarding it, so the pancakes bind without extra flour or egg.
Realistic pan discipline: how much batter, how much butter, and what the edges look like when it is time to flip.
Includes the salt pork properly rendered, which is the difference between the real dish and plain potato pancakes.

Ingredients.

9 items

Servings

Equipment

Coarse box grater
Large non-stick or well-seasoned frying pan
Thin metal spatula
Wire rack

Instructions.

Make the batter base
Whisk the flour with a third of the milk until completely smooth and lump-free, then whisk in the rest of the milk, the eggs, salt and white pepper. The batter should be thin — about the consistency of single cream. Leave it while you fry the pork.
Tip Adding the milk in two stages is the whole trick to a lump-free batter; dumping it all in at once guarantees flour lumps.
Render the pork
Lay the pork strips in a cold, dry frying pan and set it over medium-low heat. Cook for 10–12 minutes, turning occasionally, until the fat has run out clear and the meat is golden and curling at the edges. Keep it warm and reserve a tablespoon of the rendered fat.
Grate the potatoes
Working quickly, grate the peeled potatoes on the coarse side of a box grater straight into the batter, stirring every so often so the fresh shreds are coated and do not discolour. Do not drain or squeeze them — that liquid is part of the batter.
Fry the first pancake
Melt a knob of butter with a little of the pork fat in a wide pan over medium heat until it foams. Ladle in enough batter to spread to about 15 cm, pushing the potato out evenly with the back of the ladle so there are no thick heaps.
Fry until lacy
Cook for 3 minutes without touching it, until the edges look dry, lacy and brown and the top has set from wet to matte. Slide a thin spatula right under, flip, and give it 2–3 minutes more until the second side is spotted golden and the pancake feels firm.
Tip If the butter stops foaming and starts smoking, the pan is too hot — the potato will brown before it cooks through.
Repeat and hold
Wipe the pan if it darkens, add fresh butter, and repeat with the remaining batter — you should get eight pancakes. Rest each one on a wire rack in a 100°C oven rather than stacking them, so steam escapes and they stay crisp.
Serve
Put two pancakes on each warm plate with a heap of fried pork alongside and a generous spoonful of lingonberry jam. Eat straight away, while the edges are still audibly crisp.

Tips from our kitchen.

Grate the potatoes last, directly into the finished batter. Left standing, raw grated potato goes grey and weeps water within minutes.
Use the coarse side of the grater. Fine shreds turn to mush and lose the shaggy edges that give raggmunk its name.
Fry in butter, not oil. The nutty browned butter is a flavour component here, not just a non-stick measure — add fresh butter for every batch.
Keep them thin: about a ladleful spread to 15 cm. A thick raggmunk browns outside while the potato in the middle is still raw and squeaky.
Hold finished pancakes on a rack in a low oven, never stacked on a plate — stacking traps steam and the crispness is gone in two minutes.
Render the pork slowly from a cold pan so the fat melts out before the meat colours; started hot it seizes and stays chewy.

Substitutions.

Salted side pork (fläsk) → Thick-cut streaky bacon or pancetta: Bacon is smoked and Swedish fläsk usually is not, so the flavour tilts a little. Use it in thicker slices than usual so it stays meaty rather than shattering.
Lingonberry jam → Cranberry sauce thinned with lemon juice, or tart redcurrant jelly: The job is acidity against fat. Anything sweet-sharp works; a fruit compote that is merely sweet does not.
Whole milk → Oat milk: Works surprisingly well and is very common in Sweden. The pancakes brown slightly faster, so drop the heat a touch.

Variations.

Rårakor: The batter-free sibling: the same grated raw potato seasoned and fried in butter with nothing to bind it. Crisper and more fragile, and often served with roe and sour cream rather than pork.
Vegetarian raggmunk: Skip the pork and serve with fried mushrooms and lingonberries, or with a fried egg on top. Common in Swedish canteens and entirely respectable.
Raggmunk with roe: A restaurant treatment: smaller pancakes topped with crème fraîche, bleak roe and finely chopped red onion, served as a starter rather than a main.

Storage & reheating.

Raggmunk is a dish to eat immediately; it loses its crispness within about ten minutes of leaving the pan and never fully regains it. If you do have leftovers, refrigerate for up to 2 days and revive them in a dry hot frying pan for 2 minutes a side rather than in a microwave, which steams them limp. The batter itself cannot be made ahead once the potato is in — it will discolour and separate within half an hour — but you can mix the flour, milk and egg base up to a day early and grate the potato in at the last moment.

Serve with

Fried salt pork, lingonberry jam, and cold milk or a light beer — the standard Swedish trio.

The story behind Raggmunk.

Raggmunk belongs to the older, thriftier layer of Swedish husmanskost, from a time when potatoes were the one thing every household had and a little flour and milk turned them into a meal. The name is a puzzle even in Swedish: "munk" is an old word for a fried cake — the same word behind Swedish doughnuts — and "ragg" means coarse or shaggy hair, most likely describing the rough, straggly edges the grated potato makes as it fries. That reading is widely accepted but not certain, and there is no single documented origin story attached to a person or a place.

What the dish does have is a fixed accompaniment, and it is not negotiable in Sweden: stekt fläsk, thick strips of lightly salted side pork fried until the fat renders and the edges curl, plus lingonberry jam. The three-part logic is the same one that runs through the whole cuisine — something rich, something salty, something sour — and eating raggmunk without lingonberries strikes Swedes as roughly as sensible as eating chips with no salt. In parts of the country a closely related dish called rårakor is made from the same grated potato with no batter at all, and the two get confused constantly, including by Swedes.

Raggmunk is also school-canteen and workplace-lunch food, appearing on the weekly rotation across the country and carrying, for many Swedes, exactly the nostalgic weight that a specific childhood dish carries anywhere. The version below is the home one: grated by hand at the last minute, fried in a lot of butter, and eaten immediately, because raggmunk waits for nobody and turns leathery under a lid.

Questions, answered.

What is the difference between raggmunk and rårakor?

Raggmunk has a thin flour-milk-egg batter binding the grated potato, making it a true pancake. Rårakor is grated raw potato alone, seasoned and fried, closer to a Swiss rösti. Raggmunk is softer inside and more forgiving to flip; rårakor is crisper and more fragile. Swedes mix up the names regularly.

Should I squeeze the water out of the grated potato?

No — this is where raggmunk differs from many other potato pancakes. The potato liquid and its starch are part of the batter and help it bind. Squeezing the shreds dry gives a stiffer, drier pancake that tastes more like a hash brown than the real thing.

Why do my potato pancakes fall apart when I flip them?

Usually the pan was not hot enough or you turned them too early. Wait until the underside is set and genuinely browned and the edges look lacy and dry — around three minutes — before sliding a thin spatula all the way under. Too much potato relative to batter also weakens the structure, so keep the ratio as written.

Which potatoes work best?

Floury or all-purpose varieties like King Edward, Maris Piper or Russet. They release enough starch to hold the pancake together and go fluffy inside. Waxy salad potatoes stay firm and slippery, so the shreds never quite fuse and the pancake tastes raw in the middle.

Can I make raggmunk without the pork?

Yes, and vegetarian versions are common in Sweden. Serve them with lingonberry jam and either fried mushrooms, a fried egg, or crème fraîche and chives. You will want a little extra salt in the batter, since the pork normally supplies much of the seasoning on the plate.

All recipes →