good morning beautiful friends. I hope and pray that wherever you all are that you're having a most wonderful Saturday morning. it's pretty nice in my neck of the woods this morning. the temps have cooled off and for that, I'm so grateful. as I sit here typing, the community at large is pretty quiet. there's not even any barking dogs at the moment. the birds that talk to us in the shrubbery outside the windows must be talking to someone else, but even they are quiet this morning. that's ok though, everyone will start stirring in a little while and that will break the silence.
I had mentioned in the last post or two that I was in the process of removing my facebook page. well, I got so far with it and decided to stop. I got all the way back to 2016 removing all the posts that didn't have family pictures in them. I'll stop there and leave the pictures, so I'll still be on facebook but just not nowhere near as active as I once was. I'm good with that. I'll no longer be sharing any cooking or kitchen activities of any kind. I'm very happy with that decision and happy that I didn't delete my whole account. that was my first intention. but after talking with a friend about it and her saying she just used facebook to keep in touch with family, I thought that was a pretty wise decision. so that's what I'm doing. anyway, just wanted to toss that out there.
ok, so let's go back to that title. what's that all about, you might be asking. well, let me tell ya. my kroger had russet potatoes on sale this week for $1.99 for 5 lbs. that's a pretty good deal around here since you can't get 5 lbs of any potatoes for less that $5.00. so I jumped on that sale and got 4, 5lb bags. we could get up to 5 bags, but I just 4 bags. so when I got home from the store on friday morning, we ate breakfast and I got the kitchen cleaned up and started with the first bag. if I'm fixing potatoes for a meal, I'll use the potato peeler. since I was going to dehydrate them, I just use my paring knife since it was much quicker to peel them with that.
I have a process for dehydrating potatoes, and that's what I'm going to share, so that you can too, can get pristine color potatoes when you dehydrate. I start off with a big bowl of cold water. when I get a tater peeled, in the water it goes. after all the potatoes are peeled, I swish them around in that bowl of water. this washes them and washes away starches from the potatoes. I drain that water because it's full of starch. it looks like dishsoap and milk. sudsy and white. so I drain that and run more cold water on them. I get my pot of blanch water ready and on the stove and getting it to a boil. while it's reaching the boiling stage, I'm slicing my potatoes. as I slice them, they go back in the cold water. once they're all sliced, I drain that water off. because once again, it looks like sudsy dishsoap and milk. every time you cut your potatoes, they are releasing more starch. starch is the enemy of dehydrated potatoes. if the starch is left on them, the starch will turn gray or black during the dehydrating process.
once all the potatoes are sliced and rinsed again, with more cold water run over them, you can start blanching them. I have a steamer basket that I use in my electric pressure cookers and it's perfect toe blanch in. so I'll fill it 2/3 full and drop that down in my blanch water. once it comes back to a rolling boil, I'll time it for about 2 to 4 minutes, depending on the thickness of the slices. if I'm making 1/2 inch cubes, I'll blanch for about 5 minutes. once the blanching is done, I'll lift my steamer basket out of the blanch water and sit it in a bowl of ice water. this bring the temp down quickly and halts the cooking process. I'll let them drain in a bowl, then I'll have a floursack towel lined cookie sheet ready and dump them on the cookie sheet. then I'll refill my steamer basket and start the blanching process again until all my potatoes are blanched.
I'll start filling my dehydrator trays and when I get both dehydrators filled, if there is any left, I'll put them a bowl of water and pop them in the fridge and use them for the next dehydrator full. as long as they stay covered with ice or cold water, they won't turn dark at all.
the key to pretty dehydrated taters is lots of rinsing. rinse after peeling and rinse a couple times after slicing. I notice that even the ice water bowl will have more starch residue in the bottom when I'm done with all the cold water. but if I had not have rinsed as much as I did, my potatoes would have been gray and black. now, if you have done this and you haven't rinsed and you have gray or black potatoes, they are still perfectly fine to use. they're just not not pretty. that's all. so don't think you have to throw them away if the starches turned black or gray, you don't.
so it took me about an hour and a half to get my dehydrators loaded up yesterday. it sounds like a very time consuming situation. but really, it's not. I just take a few minutes to get as much ready before hand as I possibly can. get everything as prepared as you can and you can work from one station to the next pretty quickly. and I keep everything cleaned up between steps. that makes a big difference.
so I got a bag of potatoes worked up and dehydrated yesterday. I got another bag worked up and on the dehydrator today. I have just a few in the fridge. I'm hoping that when they start shrinking down, I can get those on the dehydrator and get those done. I'll work up the other 2 bags come monday and tuesday. I do have a few pictures to share of my process and when you see the pictures, you'll know what I was talking about when I said the water looked liked sudsy dishsoap and milk.
see that soapy substance around the edge of the bowl, that's starch. you can't see how milky it is in this picture, but you can in the next picture.
this is what the water looked like after I had removed the potatoes. really milky and soapy looking. that's just starch. if that had stayed on my potatoes, they would have been gray or black when I dehydrated them.
this is potatoes in my second bowl and the rinse water is clear. even when I removed the potatoes from this bowl, there was starch in the bottom of it. every time you rinse, you remove more starch. that's a good thing.
this is the finished product. there is no black or gray on these. they are quite beautiful and I'm really pleased with them. these are a lot thinner than most that I make. the batch that I'm working on right now is probably twice the thickness of these.
both of these quart jars are full as of this morning. these turned out really nice. I'm really happy with them.
this is looking down in the top of the jar.
a lot of people will dip there everything including their potatoes in lemon juice. I done that very early on with a lot of stuff I dehydrated and we did not like everything tasting like lemon juice. so it's really up to the individual as to whether you dip in lemon juice or not. and I've never seen better results than what I get with making sure to rinse mine at least 3 times and then blanch and then cool off in ice water bath.
this is just how I finally learned to end up with really nice looking potatoes. now, the ones, I put on this morning are about twice as thick as these. these curled up like potato chips. if I would have thought about it, I would have sprinkled them with some kind of seasoning. hahaha
well, this is part of of the great tater caper. I hope I don't forget to share more pictures of the thicker sliced ones. I'm also going to do 1/2 cubes. I 'll show and tell how I do that too.
well, that's just about it for today. I got a late start at posting this and just about time to whip up some lunch. I hope y'all have a wonderful afternoon. just know that you are loved. God wants to be in right relationship with us enough that He provided the only way and that is thru the shed blood of His Son, Jesus Christ. God loved us enough to do that for us. I pray that you have accepted the free gift of salvation. blessings and hugs, patty
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