Processing Potatoes

This year in the garden we planted potatoes.  Five small starter potatoes.  That grew taller, and taller, and then finally created a potato “wall” in the middle of the garden (making it a bit hard to get to the other side to weed!).

I wasn’t sure what I would find when I dug up the new potatoes, but, to my great surprise they had multiplied!  A lot.

What to do with all those potatoes?

I had the brilliant idea of making homemade french fries.

That was, until I started making them.

Let me tell you that making homemade french fries is an incredibly labor intensive project!  According to my Ball Blue Book, here’s the basic steps to creating homemade french fries:

1) Wash potatoes.
2) Peel potatoes.
3) Wash potatoes again.
4) Cut potatoes (thankfully, I had a mandoline for this that cut in julienne pieces, but I also cut a few that were circles and some just haphazardly with a knife).
5) Soak in ascorbic acid (vitamin C) solution to prevent browning.
6) Dry potatoes.
7) Deep fry potatoes until light golden brown in small batches.

It was all going in a nice assembly line fashion until the last step.  Small batches for me meant a handful of fries at a time.  And, the assembly line was cranking out lots of handfuls of fries at a time!  We had a little backup.  I stopped the assembly line.  Called my mother, and had a nice chat.  And three hours later, was still frying up french fries.

And, in the process I overflowed the hot oil (can anyone say grease fire?) twice.  Turns out water and hot oil don’t mix well, so they weren’t kidding when they said DRY the potatoes in step number 6.  We are talking really dry.

The one other problem was that as I was making them for three hours, my family kept eating them as we went along.  All of them.  Every last tiny batch.  All gone.

The original plan was to freeze them to cook another night, but that was quickly thrown out the window, as my family kept eating.

But, I still had mounds of potatoes (already cut, mind you) waiting for their turn in the tiny saucepan.  So, I thought I would try to bake them.

And bake them, I did.  Let’s just say that was a small disaster, but, around midnight, I did manage to get one tiny batch into a freezer bag and frozen.  Not sure exactly how they will taste afterward.  I think I might try to deep fry them when they come out of the freezer, just because they were SO much better that way.  The oven produced some kind of mushy fries, and some burnt to a crisp fries.

At this point, I gave up and decided I would can the rest of the potatoes (on another day), and just make mashed potatoes.  I think I’ll save the homemade french fries for special occasions (or get a larger pan of oil going – but I didn’t have enough).

This time, I also fried them in really-bad-for-you-but-it’s-the-only-thing-I-have-a-large-enough-quantity-of vegetable oil.  Next time, I’ll stock up on the coconut oil instead, and do it a bit healthier.

And, if you want a really healthy version, check out this post from The Healthy Home Economist Sarah.

What do you do with your potatoes?

To your success,

Dr. Laura

Share