Most People Are Cooking Potatoes Wrong! Try These German Tricks for Perfect Potatoes Every Time

Most People Are Cooking Potatoes Wrong! Try These German Tricks for Perfect Potatoes Every Time If your potatoes fall apart in the water, if your mash turns to glue, if your fried potatoes go soft and gray in the pan — it is not your fault, and I can show you exactly where it went wrong. My grandmother Käthe kept the potatoes in a wooden box bedded with sand in the cellar under our house outside Ulm. In 1962 that box held enough to carry six people from October to April, and every few weeks she went through it with her bare hands and pulled out anything that had gone green. She never explained why. She did not have to. She cooked them the day before she needed them, salted the water before she lit the stove, and never once owned a mixer. I know this because I stood next to her on the cellar steps for fifteen years, and because I have been cooking German food in an American kitchen ever since. I am Petra Weber. I am 72. I was born in a village outside Ulm, came to the United States at 25, and I still cook the way she did. In this one: - Why the bag in the American store tells you NOTHING you need to know, and what the German bag prints right on the front - Why potatoes go into COLD water, and why the salt goes in before the heat does - AUSDAMPFEN — the one minute after you drain them that nobody in America is ever taught - Why a mixer, a blender or a food processor turns mash into wallpaper PASTE, and what to use instead - Butter BEFORE the milk, and why the order changes everything - The white layer at the bottom of the bowl that the baking aisle sells back to you for eight dollars a pound - And number twelve, THE NIGHT — the free thing that happens after the stove is off, and the reason a German potato salad holds together without a cup of mayonnaise The method in one line: cold water, salt from the start, skins on, a pot so quiet you can hear the clock — and cook them the day before. One safety word: light turns a potato green, and what comes with the green does not cook out. A small green patch, peel deep and cut a wide margin. Green over half of it, soft, long sprouts, or bitter on the tongue — that one goes in the bin. Bitter is the signal. Now tell me down in the comments: which one of these did your family already do without ever saying why? And where are you watching from — your town, your state, your country? I read every one.