The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [26]
Mashing your potato. Mash immediately after you drain the potato slices. The goal here is to separate the cells without rupturing them, and the perfect temperature for achieving this is about 180 degrees Fahrenheit. As the potato cools to room temperature, the pectic cement hardens again, and many more cells break open when you mash them, spilling out their sticky starchy gel. At 50 degrees half the cells will rupture.
Any cookbook that sanctions the use of a blender or food processor for mashing should be carefully shredded. People who like to use a hand masher because the resulting lumps remind them of their mothers’ cooking ignore the fact that this technique repeatedly abuses the already mashed portions of the potato while you seek out the solid pieces that remain. A ricer is best because each potato cell passes through it only once, and all the pressure is applied in a vertical direction. In contrast, a food mill shears more cells apart by scraping them across the screen as you turn the handle, but it is possible that our precooking technique will permit the use of a food mill without fear of gumminess and produce a perfectly smooth result at the same time. Further experimentation lies ahead.
Steamy cooked potatoes should be dried either before or after mashing. You can return the slices to the pan, cover them with a folded kitchen towel, and shake the pan every so often for the next five minutes. Or you can rice the potatoes back into their pan and stir over low heat for a minute or two until a film appears on the bottom of the pan. Use a softly rounded wooden spoon. Be gentle.
Enriching your potato. How much butter you add is your business. I find that a stick of butter for every two pounds of potatoes (serves four to six) is a bit austere but that Robuchon overdoes it with three or four. If you beat in the butter first and then hot milk or cream (over low heat), you can achieve any consistency you like, from runny to stiff, but if you do it the other way round, it is hard to know how much milk to add. Georges Blanc advises incorporating the butter right away, keeping the potatoes warm, and adding heavy cream at the last minute. If you hold mashed potatoes for a while over warm, not simmering, water, don’t cover the pan completely or the flavor will turn on you and gumminess set in.
Should your butter be very hard or very soft when you beat it in? Do you dare to use a whisk? (Michel Guerard says never.) Do waxy potatoes and new potatoes precook successfully? Is steaming better than boiling?
At present I am at a complete loss for answers to these remaining questions, and I will not be altogether happy with my mashed potatoes until the whole truth comes out. My next set of experiments begins tonight.
January 1989
Author’s Note:
Joël Robuchon’s potato is now the ratte—small, waxy, yellow fleshed, and available at some farmers’ markets, including mine. Robuchon uses a food mill to mash his potatoes, then arduously rubs the puree through a sieve.
Water
I love the taste of calcium carbonate, or at least I think I do. Zinc leaves me cold, and I am lukewarm about lithium chloride. But silicate can taste just great—up to a point, of course.
Cool, crisp, pure, crystalline water is my favorite nonalcoholic drink, more than the juice of the blood orange and even more than diet Coke. Most Americans would disagree. One day in 1986 we began drinking less water, from both tap and bottle, than we did soft drinks. In future years this will be viewed as an awesome and chilling event, our final break with the natural world, but as far as I can remember, the moment passed unnoticed. I was probably drinking a Tab.
For the past few months I have been racking my brain, which is 75 percent water, to understand what perfect water should taste like. Several experts in the science of flavor have tried to persuade me that we all simply prefer the water