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Authors: Jeffrey Steingarten
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precisely why mashed potatoes and the other fashionable comfort foods have become so important to us. They let us feel chic and trendy without having to eat tuna carpaccio and fava beans. Considering the smear campaign against dietary fats being waged by the surgeon general and his ilk, mashed potatoes are a godsend.
But while Omar Sharif swans about Paris, my mashed potatoes still get gummy on me. Sometimes they go cataclysmically wrong, turning sticky and gluey or doughy and pasty, bonding to my teeth and gums and the roof of my mouth, coating my tongue and throat.
As luck would have it, the instant mashed potato industry is even more panicky about sticky potatoes than I am. An average potato, on its long journey from loamy meadow to those packets of dehydrated granules on your supermarket shelves, undergoes such intricate torture that its aptitude for gumminess is amplified many times over. Industry scientists, whose careers depend on preventing potatoes from turning out that way, publish their findings in various technical journals here and abroad, which a teacher in Atlanta named Shirley Corriher, who is writing a book on the science of cooking, showed me how to find with my personal computer. Of the 341 papers written on mashed potatoes in the past twenty years, thirty seemed especially worth reading, as did Potato Processing, the bible of the industry. The USDA did much of the early work on instant mashed potatoes, and its expert in California, Merle Weaver, was particularly helpful to me over the telephone.
What follows is a series of small suggestions for making good mashed potatoes and one big suggestion. Whether to label the latter a major breakthrough in home culinary science is for others to judge.
Let’s get acquainted with the potato. The potato is the most important vegetable in the world. Ten billion bushels are grown every year, almost half of them in Russia and Poland, where vodka is extremely popular. Mashed potatoes whipped with milk are a nearly perfect food that single-handedly nourished nineteenth-century Ireland until the potato blight struck and things turned rough. Without milk, potatoes will keep you alive for 167 days if you can stomach 3 3 /4 pounds of them a day. The average American consumes one medium potato a day, or 110 pounds a year, as often as not in processed form—chips and other snacks, frozen French fries, and instant granules—and derives more vitamin C from potatoes than from citrus fruits. (Back in the days when citrus was still a tropical rarity, potatoes offered the main protection against scurvy.) Raw potatoes are 70 to 80 percent water (making them almost as wet as milk) and 10 to 20 percent starch, with the remainder in sugars, fiber, minerals, and high-quality protein. A potato contains virtually no fat and about as many calories as an apple or a banana.
The potato plant is a perennial herb of the Solanaceae family with purple or yellow flowers and, occasionally, a fruit that looks like an amiable little green tomato but poisons you like the berry of the nightshade. The edible potato is not a root vegetable at all but a tuber—the swollen tip of the plant’s underground stem. The eyes of a potato are not arranged randomly but continue the pattern set on the stem by its branches and leaves: a spiral with thirteen leaves or eyes for every five turns of the helix. Sugar is manufactured in the leaves and transported to the underground tuber, where it is turned into starch.
Why your potato turns gummy. Like other living things, a potato is composed of millions of cells all cemented together. Lining the walls of each potato cell are hard, closely packed microscopic granules of starch, impervious to the water that fills the rest of the cell. But when you heat a potato to about 140 degrees Fahrenheit, the starch granules begin to absorb the water around them, and by 160 degrees they have swollen to many times their original size. The starch is now a gel, a viscous complex
But while Omar Sharif swans about Paris, my mashed potatoes still get gummy on me. Sometimes they go cataclysmically wrong, turning sticky and gluey or doughy and pasty, bonding to my teeth and gums and the roof of my mouth, coating my tongue and throat.
As luck would have it, the instant mashed potato industry is even more panicky about sticky potatoes than I am. An average potato, on its long journey from loamy meadow to those packets of dehydrated granules on your supermarket shelves, undergoes such intricate torture that its aptitude for gumminess is amplified many times over. Industry scientists, whose careers depend on preventing potatoes from turning out that way, publish their findings in various technical journals here and abroad, which a teacher in Atlanta named Shirley Corriher, who is writing a book on the science of cooking, showed me how to find with my personal computer. Of the 341 papers written on mashed potatoes in the past twenty years, thirty seemed especially worth reading, as did Potato Processing, the bible of the industry. The USDA did much of the early work on instant mashed potatoes, and its expert in California, Merle Weaver, was particularly helpful to me over the telephone.
What follows is a series of small suggestions for making good mashed potatoes and one big suggestion. Whether to label the latter a major breakthrough in home culinary science is for others to judge.
Let’s get acquainted with the potato. The potato is the most important vegetable in the world. Ten billion bushels are grown every year, almost half of them in Russia and Poland, where vodka is extremely popular. Mashed potatoes whipped with milk are a nearly perfect food that single-handedly nourished nineteenth-century Ireland until the potato blight struck and things turned rough. Without milk, potatoes will keep you alive for 167 days if you can stomach 3 3 /4 pounds of them a day. The average American consumes one medium potato a day, or 110 pounds a year, as often as not in processed form—chips and other snacks, frozen French fries, and instant granules—and derives more vitamin C from potatoes than from citrus fruits. (Back in the days when citrus was still a tropical rarity, potatoes offered the main protection against scurvy.) Raw potatoes are 70 to 80 percent water (making them almost as wet as milk) and 10 to 20 percent starch, with the remainder in sugars, fiber, minerals, and high-quality protein. A potato contains virtually no fat and about as many calories as an apple or a banana.
The potato plant is a perennial herb of the Solanaceae family with purple or yellow flowers and, occasionally, a fruit that looks like an amiable little green tomato but poisons you like the berry of the nightshade. The edible potato is not a root vegetable at all but a tuber—the swollen tip of the plant’s underground stem. The eyes of a potato are not arranged randomly but continue the pattern set on the stem by its branches and leaves: a spiral with thirteen leaves or eyes for every five turns of the helix. Sugar is manufactured in the leaves and transported to the underground tuber, where it is turned into starch.
Why your potato turns gummy. Like other living things, a potato is composed of millions of cells all cemented together. Lining the walls of each potato cell are hard, closely packed microscopic granules of starch, impervious to the water that fills the rest of the cell. But when you heat a potato to about 140 degrees Fahrenheit, the starch granules begin to absorb the water around them, and by 160 degrees they have swollen to many times their original size. The starch is now a gel, a viscous complex
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