So on Saturday afternoon I canned potatoes! I got a great deal on some nice clean small Yukon Golds the other day and I bought 15 lbs of them for canning. One of our favorite meals is fried potatoes with kielbasa sausage and some sort of veggie, usually broccoli. When I go back to work next week, it'll be Tommy's job to feed the kids and make dinner. Since he isn't really much of a cook I generally try to have easy stuff on hand for him to throw together. I had the great idea of cutting up potatoes and canning them and then all he'd have to do is drain them, throw in the sausage and veggies and voila - dinner!One of my most despised kitchen jobs is scrubbing potatoes. That's one of the reasons I'm going to grow mine in straw or some sort of mulch next year - I just really hate getting potatoes that are covered in dirt to scrub off. The potatoes I bought for canning were actually pretty clean (and to my delight, all pretty small). However, I still didn't want to take chances and I needed to clean them myself, right? Well, forever searching for an innovative way to make my life easier I thought about THIS:
I did some googling and turns out the Washington State Potato people actually say it's fine to clean potatoes in a soapless dishwasher. Who knew? :) In any case, it made my life much simpler. I wouldn't do it except for canning because the cycle heated up the potatoes a bit which would really reduce their shelf life I imagine, but for this purpose it was great. I wasn't planning on skinning them so it went really quickly.
I basically just cut them up and threw them in quart jars with a tsp of flaked canning salt and covered with boiling water. You are supposed to process them at 10 lbs for 40 minutes... I think I had too much pressure. I couldn't seem to get the burner on the right temperature and so I ended up overprocessing them a bit. I only made 8 quarts since that's all the jars I had at the time, but since then I've gotten more jars. I still have a few pounds left, and actually I might go pick up more potatoes since they were so easy to can. So I'll try it again... the ones I have now are sort of disintegrated. I'm sure they will be great for mashed potatoes or whatnot, just not the frying potatoes that I wanted.Of course, I'll update when I do those as well.
