I Thought These Potatoes Were Ruined….

If you follow us you know we recently harvested 121 pounds of potatoes. Some of those potatoes were absolutely perfect but some of them looked a little rough. They had some spots on them just like this and I am one who doesn't like to throw away anything unless I absolutely have to. So I figured that I could still use these and I want to show you exactly how I'm using these potatoes that might look a little questionable. Some holes in them. That's still a perfectly good potato. The only thing that we have to do is preserve them now. We can't let them store in the garage with our other potatoes that don't have holes in them. So I'm going to show you how I plan on preserving a bunch of these potatoes so that we don't lose any of our harvest. So first thing I want to show you is what it looks like when I peel these potatoes and how quickly those rotten spots are just discarded of. When we first harvested these I was really really nervous because the first year I ever grew potatoes we had a ton of rotten potatoes. I couldn't use any of them. So when I saw some of these with spots on them this year I was terrified that my potatoes had been left in the ground too long and that they were rotten. But I'm so thrilled to show y'all that they are still perfectly good. You just have to take off that first little layer and you have a perfectly good potato. The first thing that I want to make is freeze dried mashed potatoes. I've cubed and rinsed all of our potatoes really good to make sure they're good and clean. And when I say all of my potatoes this ain't even close to all of the potatoes. I've got a big old pot over here also filled with water and potatoes that needs to be dealt with as well. But I think we're going to do something different with these. For our freeze dried mashed potatoes we are going to just fill this pot up with cold water and make sure the water's like about an inch over the potatoes. Now we're going to turn the heat on and bring these up to a boil. And I'm also going to salt the water generously. I still have this giant pot of potatoes that needs to be used up. My original plan was to turn those into gnocchi. And I've only ever made sweet potato gnocchi and it was years ago. So I couldn't really remember. So I started looking up stuff. And you are not supposed to make gnocchi with boiled potatoes or peeled potatoes. You're supposed to bake a whole potato in the oven with the skin on. Bake it till it's tender. Let it cool. And then use a potato ricer or even a peeler. Peel the potato like shred it. Not peeler sorry. Shredder like cheese grater. There we go. Grate the potato and then turn that into gnocchi. So I can't do that because all these potatoes are already peeled and sitting in water. I don't want to turn all of these into mashed potatoes like the freeze dried ones. And then I thought well I could just dice them up blanch them and freeze them in cubes. But I didn't really want to do that either. I think what I want to do is turn these into hash browns. Which will be really fun to have on hand. I have never had homemade hash browns in the freezer. So that's what we're going to do with these. I've got the stove on and these potatoes are going to boil for like 10 to 15 minutes until they're just fork tender. We don't want them as tender as our mashed potatoes are going to be. We want these to have a little bit more structure to them because we're going to send them through the grater to shred them up. Our potatoes are done boiling. I cut mine into small pieces so they only went for seven minutes. But I want to show you that's what fork tender looks like. Okay we take a little fork and it just goes like that. I need a bigger colander than what I have. But I don't have a bigger colander than what I have. So I'm just going to take a slotted spoon and I'm going to scoop these out into our colander. We want to get all of this water out of this pot and we're going to put these potatoes back onto the stove just for a second and turn the heat on low just to make sure any water that's left in these potatoes is evaporated out before we mash them. Now we're adding those potatoes back into our pot and we've turned that heat on just for a minute to get any excess moisture evaporated out. While they're good and hot we're going to throw them into our KitchenAid mixer and I'm not going to add any butter, any seasoning, anything like that. This is just going to be plain old mashed potatoes and then whenever I go to reconstitute them after we freeze dried them and they're in like powder form then I'll add in butter, milk, seasonings, stuff like that. From the research I've done it says that if you keep it just the plain old potatoes it lasts for so much longer. Now I'm just taking my freeze dryer trays and loading them up with mashed potatoes. Okay our hash browns potatoes not hash browns yet but our potatoes that will become hash browns have boiled and now they need to go into an ice bath. I'll have to do this in batches just because it's so many potatoes and I don't have a container large enough for this ice bath but this is gonna kind of stop the cooking process because we don't want these super matched because we're gonna grate them up into hash browns. I got all of our mashed potatoes onto our freeze dryer trays and now these are gonna go into our freezer to freeze completely and then Chris will put them into the freeze dryer. Emily has tasked me with making the instant freeze dried mashed potatoes so we have pre-frozen these mashed potatoes which just makes the process go a little bit faster and what we're going to do is open up our Harvest Ride freeze dryer and we're just going to slide these trays right into the freeze dryer. We chose to go with no seasoning on these mashed potatoes or milk or butter because that will allow these instant mashed potatoes to be shelf stable for the longest time possible. Apparently if sealed properly these mashed potatoes should be good for 25 years on our pantry shelf. We're gonna get that loaded up, tighten the door down, let's continue and it is starting to freeze dry. We just have it on the standard settings so this should take about 24 to 36 hours. The machine will be able to tell and let us know when it's done. I'll pull it out, check for dryness and it might need some extra dry time which we will add then. Now we just sit and wait and I'll keep you updated when it's finished. Good morning! It is the next day and I played the Opry last night and had a ball. We got home late and I got as much sleep as I possibly could but I literally have to leave in 10 minutes. I've been packing this morning and getting ready to go out on the road again and our potatoes that are going to be our hash browns they have been in the fridge overnight and they look great and so what we're going to do now is use our KitchenAid. I have one of these little grater attachments and I'm trying to think. I think all my big bowls are dirty which is not good. I have this big pot we're going to use that one. So I've got our potatoes that have just been in the fridge submerged in water and I'm just going to drop them in to my KitchenAid attachment. Let me give you a close-up. So the potato will just go in there. We'll turn this on and that'll shred it up. All right we have a full pot of hash browns. We still have a couple more potatoes left to do but these need to dry out and get all the excess moisture out of them before we freeze them. Chris just got home and he's like I thought you had to leave and I do. Okay so I'm almost done making the hash browns and Chris is going to finish the project for me but I have two tea towels right here and I'm just going to dump these hash browns out onto the tea towel. I just made a mess and spread them out as good as I can and these are totally clean tea towels and we're going to let those just kind of air out and the tea towels soak up as much moisture as they can and then before Chris puts them on the baking sheet because we're going to flash freeze them he's going to put them on a baking sheet with parchment paper and let them freeze and then we can transfer them into baggies but before he does that maybe what I want you to do is just kind of go through and like squeeze out any moisture kind of like that after they've kind of aired out if that makes sense and then we'll have hash browns. So Chris is going to continue this process and then we will show you what we're left with after everything is frozen and put up the freezer. All right the freeze dryer is done with the potatoes we're gonna pull them out we're gonna check them for dryness and they literally just crumble into a powder. That's how we know that the freeze drying process is done if I did that and it wasn't completely dry we would put them back in and add some more dry time but I think that they're ready so I'm gonna take these inside. Sorry for the noise Emily has a canning project going on but the next step is to bring the trays inside we're gonna break the potatoes into chunks and just drop it into our food processor. We're gonna start with just one tray it's about always a bit clamp our lid down and then we'll grind it up. Now we have this powder I may need to go a little longer steal some chunks yeah a little bit longer excuse the mess like I said Emily is canning but the next step we're going to take a mason jar and a funnel drop it in and we're going to just spoon all of our instant mashed potatoes down into our mason jar. I already filled one of these jars up and two of these freeze-dried trays worth of potatoes filled this size mason jar perfect. Put the last of tray number two down in the funnel see it was the perfect amount for one of these large mason jars. Now we're just going to take our normal mason jar lid pop it on top and I'm going to use one of these mason jar vacuum sealers sit it down on top of the jar turn it on we're going to hold it down for 60 seconds until the jar seals. Well in the time it took for our freeze dryer to run and turn these mashed potatoes into freeze-dried powdered instant mashed potatoes we had a big party and we've already used one of our massive gallon size freezer bags of hash browns already so I can't show you everything we put up because we've already eaten some of it but we have two more full bags of frozen hash browns ready to go and I can say that the ones that we've already used to make hash brown casserole were perfect and we have two quart size jars of our freeze-dried powdered mashed potatoes So this was such a good way to use some of those potatoes that would have gone bad otherwise and I know that we will pull from this for the next couple of months for sure. We still have a ton more potatoes out in the garage and I think it would be fun to make some gnocchi that we can maybe put in vacuum sealed bags and keep that in the freezer and pull it out throughout the winter. I have lots of plans so if you like food preservation videos, gardening videos, home renovations, DIY projects, then Sasser House would be the perfect home for you. So we want to invite you to subscribe and follow along if you like what you see and of course thank you for spending time out of your busy schedule with us here at the Sasser House. We'll see you on the next one. Bye!