Mr. Potato Head

With a tip of the hat to Kalba over at Slow Living in the French Pyrénées, I've had potatoes on the brain now for the past several days.  I've been thinking about buying a deep fryer for the past year or so.  Kalba beat me to the punch.  I've been meaning to get started with what certainly will be an ongoing thread about the potato.  The Germans eat a lot of potatoes (Kartoffeln, also known as Erdäpfel, literally "earth apples").  Certain foreigners here will insult Germans by calling them "you German potato" (Du deutsche Kartoffel).  I was called a German potato once by a clearly unbalanced foreigner who mistook me for a native as he was sitting at his windowsill when I passed by.  I guess this is related to similar expressions such as "Krauts" for Germans, "Frogs" for the French and "Limeys" for the British.  You are what you eat.

I'm still not ready to buy a deep fryer, but I am ready to go through another phase of getting to know the potato.  In Germany, potatoes are sold based primarily on how they cook.  The English terms distinguishing the textures appear to be "waxy" (festkochend) and "floury" (mehligkochend), and it appears to be related to starch content.  The high-starch potatoes are floury or mealy and make for classic baked potatoes (Offenkartoffeln), french fries (Pommes frites in Germany as in France, also referred to here as Pommes with the "s" pronounced or Fritten with a short "i") and mashed potatoes (Kartoffelbrei or Kartoffelpüree).  Let's stop right there and get to one of the first basic recipes that I just tried for homemade mashed potatoes.  My goal is to achieve a high level of fluff, naturally. 

Here's the equipment that you need:

-- one large pot for cooking the potatoes

-- one large bowl of cold water for the peeled potatoes before cooking
-- a potato ricer (Kartoffelpresse)
-- a whisk (Schneebesen)

Here is a picture of a potato ricer:

Here are the ingredients:

-- one kilogram of floury potatoes (mehligkochend)

-- ca.1/4-liter hot milk (recommend full fat for flavor)
-- ca. 100 grams butter
-- salt
-- ground pepper
-- grated nutmeg

Peel and cube the potatoes and place them in the bowl of cold water until ready to cook. Cook for about 20 minutes in boiling, salted water. Drain into a colander. press the potato cubes through the ricer back into the empty pot.  Fold in the milk and butter with a whisk.   Add salt, peper and nutmeg to taste.  The ricer creates a really fluffy potato base, but the milk and butter when folded in make it thicker.   I recommend making a few extra potatoes and/or adding the liquids slowly to avoid losing the fluffy texture.   Stop before you lose the fluff, or add potatoes as needed to restore it.  My potatoes came out really well the first try. I’m pretty sure I cooked more than 1 kg. of potatoes. I added the milk and butter early, before I had pressed all of the potatoes, causing the mixture to almost liquify. Once I finished pressing all the potatoes, though, I had a big pot of fluffy spuds. Next time I'll go more slowly with the milk.

If you are familiar with mashed potatoes made from flakes or using an electric beater, you will notice that the texture of the potatoes that have been passed through a ricer is a bit coarser, but not nearly as subject to lumps as when you use an old-fashioned masher (below).  I prefer just a bit of texture to remind me that the dish is not out of a box.  To maintain maximum fluff and avoid patato chunks, I recommend not adding any of the scrapings from the ricer.

Frau Bloggerboy uses this kind of old-fashioned masher

which produces chunkier mashed potatoes