NEVER Peel Your Potatoes Again — Try This Old TEXAS FARM Trick

Everything I know in one place. The Cookshack Book: https://earlhargrove.shop/ Pull open the kitchen drawer and look at the peeler. That little swivel blade has been around since 1947, and it made peeling so quick and so cheap that nobody stops to ask whether it should come first. Every recipe card starts the same way: peel and cube. Then comes the pot of cloudy water, the corners that go ragged before the middles are done, and potato salad that turns to paste the minute the dressing goes in. My daddy Roy fed a hay crew of thirteen men for three days in June of 1961. That was potato salad at noon, fried potatoes at supper, and a forty-pound sack gone by the second evening. There wasn't a peeler in that kitchen. Every potato went in the pot whole with the skin on, and every one held its shape. I was standing right there. I'm Earl Hargrove. Eighty-four, cattle and a little field in Gonzales County, Texas. Forty years cooking for fifteen men at a time. In this one: why a RED or YELLOW potato holds together where a russet crumbles — SCRUB, don't soak — the GREEN you always cut out, and when to throw the whole potato away — SORT by size, one pot to one size — why the skin works like a RAINCOAT in the water — a SHIVER, never a rolling boil — ONE poke with a skewer, not five with a fork — why a jacket potato fries better the NEXT DAY — and the eighth piece, Roy's: one cut around the middle before it ever hits the pot, and the skin comes off in two halves in three seconds. Most of what's good in a potato is in the flesh, not the skin. The peeler takes some of it off before you've even lit the stove, and the water in the pot soaks up more. Did your daddy peel his potatoes first, or after? Tell me his name and what county he cooked in. I read every one.