Potatoes 101: boiling, steaming, roasting, pan-frying

Potato basics today. Boiling, baking, pan-frying and roasting. The first thing to do is to choose a potato and then to cut it. Or maybe don't. If you're making plain, boiled potatoes, I say just get a bag of the little ones. These are awesome. They come in all kinds of breeds and colors and such, and they're all intended to be boiled whole with the skins, so just drop them in. And you don't need a lot of water. As long as the potatoes are submerged, you're fine. Cover it up. It'll come back to a boil fast. Here they are after 10 minutes. Some people poke them with a knife to see if they're tender. I use a fork because I know what a fork feels like when it pierces a piece of food that's too soft or not soft enough for my taste. These need another few minutes. If you find that you like them a little firmer, you do you. Just know that very underdone potatoes contain lots of anti-nutrients and can cause digestive distress. That's not something Charles Dickens just made up. Cook potatoes through. When the skin is just starting to split and peel, that's a good visual sign that we're done. If we keep going, they're gonna get mushy. As with all vegetables, boiling does leach out a lot of water-soluble vitamins that go down the drain, and that is bad. But white potatoes are still shockingly nutritious, like a huge source of vitamin C and folate in the Western diet. If there's still some water on the potatoes, you can let it steam off for a sec in the hot pan. Dress with a little olive oil or melted butter. Potatoes need lots of salt, and some pepper or such if you want. And what I love on boiled potatoes is fresh parsley. It just tastes like you're putting the whole garden directly in your mouth, in a good way. I'm sorry, but plain boiled potatoes with butter and parsley, that is like the highest form of potato, in my opinion. Weirdly neglected, because they aren't flashy enough, I guess? I don't know. But I love the way the skins pop when you bite into them. You get that nice creamy interior, a little fluffy. Treat yourself to some basic boiled potatoes today. Could you steam them instead? Yes, absolutely. Steaming does not benefit the taste and texture of potatoes the way that it does with green vegetables. I would guess because we generally cook potatoes more thoroughly. But you do get superior nutrient retention with steaming. 50% more vitamin C in steamed potatoes than in boiled potatoes, according to one study that I found. I don't know. Because potatoes are so big and bulky, I think steaming is usually just a pain, so I don't bother. If I'm worried about my C and B vitamins, I remember that I take grunes every day, so I'm probably good. Sponsor of this video. Lauren and I get out of the gym in the morning. On the way home, we each snack on a little grunes package. Each one has eight delicious little gummies in it, and if you eat them all, you get a really well-rounded, all-purpose daily supplement with vitamins and minerals, probiotics, potentially beneficial mushrooms and other stuff that you get in those greens powders, even fiber. They are the tastiest little fruit snacks you've ever had, made with real fruit, low-sugar with a no-sugar option, pectin instead of gelatin, so they're vegan. The B vitamins are methylated, which means more people are actually able to absorb them. If you have trouble swallowing pills or shakes, man, grunes is probably what you're looking for instead. Start your new year off right and get up to 52% off grunes with my link in the description. Save big with my link below. Thank you, grunes. OK, boiling and steaming is awesome, but let's move into the dry heat methods, and here we need to consider potato type. Floury baking potatoes like these with the rough skins have proportionally less water inside them and proportionally more of the linear form of the starch molecule, which makes them bake up light and fluffy. Waxy boiling potatoes with the smooth skins are wetter inside and have proportionally more of the branched form of starch. I'll show you why people don't normally bake these. And then there are the potato breeds kind of halfway between that you can use for anything, but forget about those for a second. Here's three baking potatoes. Everybody, including me, tells you to stab the potatoes a bit before you bake them, to let the steam out, otherwise they're gonna explode. Let's test that. Another thing that I usually do is oil the skins because I think that makes the whole potato cook better, and then I salt the skins because I like to eat them. Most of the fiber is in the skins. I bake potatoes at 400 F, 200 C, directly on the rack so that the bottoms get crispy, but you can put them on a sheet pan. Here, let's bake these other varieties too, just for fun. After a half an hour, I can poke them and they still feel rock hard. As Mitch Hedberg said, it takes so long to bake potatoes that you might as well throw one in on the off chance that you might want it later. You can pre-soften potatoes in the microwave a bit, but I think they taste way better done all the way in the oven. After an hour, they're squishy to the touch on the inside, which means they're ready. And look, the one we failed to pierce failed to explode. Let them cool a bit and then you can pop them open. Normally you'd top the inside now with butter and cheese and green onions and stuff, but that plain, unpierced potato flesh is fluffy and tender and delicious. It just needs salt. Here's the one that I oiled and salted like I normally do. The flesh inside is a little more smooth and moist, I suspect because the oil retains some of the water as the potato cooks. Or maybe it's just that it cooks faster when you have the oil to conduct heat into the potato more efficiently, but that one is just better. And of course the salty, crispy skin is a treat all its own. What happens when you bake a boiling potato? Well, the flesh in this red one is way more firm. It's less tender. It's smooth and creamy rather than fluffy. But the biggest difference to me is the flavor. It's just bland, whereas the baking potato took on all of these like sweet brown flavors in the oven. There's just no comparison. The red one is bland. This is a Yukon Gold potato, which is an all-purpose breed that tastes pretty good no matter what you do to it. And it's good baked, but the flavor still is not quite as strong as the proper baking potato. You can use dry heat with waxy boiling potatoes, but sauteing or pan frying just works better than baking. Should you peel? Well, these eyes all over the potato, that's just where the baby potatoes grow out from. There's nothing wrong with them. This is a gash left by a shovel or something. I will cut that off and see if there's any like deep rot under there. Just a teeny little bit to cut away. I cut off the big blemishes, but otherwise I almost never peel potatoes. The skin is good for you. The only time I peel it is when I'm going to be making like plain boiled or mashed potatoes with baking potatoes. Those rough skins on the floury potatoes just take on an unpleasant texture when cooked and served wet, but otherwise I never peel. My guess is that back in the day, potatoes came to you with lots more blemishes and other gross stuff on them, so people would almost always peel back in the day, but this potato is fine. Oh, except for that. See that little layer of green under the skin? That's an indication this potato has been exposed to too much light and some toxic, bitter compounds have formed just under the skin. That much is not a problem, but more could taste really bitter. A large amount of very green potato would make you throw up, and a huge amount could kill you, so just be aware. This is a chunk of our baking potato that I'm also cubing up to be sauteed, just so you can see the difference. Baking potato skin tastes fine if you give it some hot oil, and you need a lot of oil because potatoes are gonna absorb a lot and also you need to keep them from sticking, which is the same reason I'm stirring constantly. After five minutes, we've got some nice color on there, but the chunks are still rock hard on the inside. I'm gonna have to turn the heat way down so they don't burn while I wait for the insides to get soft, which took a whole other five minutes and the pieces are still darker than I want them. Drain excess oil on some paper towels, season and taste, and I'm sorry, those are just not good. The outside tastes burned and greasy. The inside is firm and dense. I don't like that. Same thing happens if you try to roast raw potato chunks in oil in the oven. They come out a little bit better than they do in the pan, but they're still just not that tasty. With the exception of baking, I think all other dry heat potatoes taste way better if you boil or steam them part of the way first. This is something my American parents could not teach me about. I had to learn it from British cooking shows on late night U.S. public television. If you want to salt the boil water, you can. Some salt will penetrate the interior of the pieces, but I really don't think it makes a big difference either way. Pre-boiling them absolutely does make a big difference, and the name of the game here is to boil them as long as you dare. The softer the pieces are, the crispier they're gonna get in the oil later, but they will also be prone to falling apart, so I just go until they're just barely fork tender. Drain thoroughly and let them steam off so you don't get water droplets hitting the hot oil later and exploding on you. Then you can throw these in some real hot fat and stir until they are brown and crispy. Use an oil or a fat that you like the taste of, because a lot of it is gonna end up inside the potato. People use duck fat for this stage, all kinds of things. Since the inside is already done, these are finished when I like the outside. I do not like them too dark, so they're done. Give them a drain, season while they're hot and the seasoning will stick better. Maybe a little bit of that parsley, and there we go with some sautéed potatoes, or you could call them home fries. They're just as crispy as fries on the outside, and they're soft and fluffy inside. The baking potatoes especially so. The waxy potatoes are firmer and creamier on the inside, but they also held their shape better during cooking, and there's pluses and minuses with either. Let's try roasting some of these parboiled potatoes in the oven. Smoosh them around in some oil and seasonings. When the surface gets a little busted up like that, those are the parts that go crazy crisp in the oven. I suspect because it's like a slurry of starch and oil that just gets super hot. If you want to stir them halfway through for even cooking, wait until they seem ready to release from the pan. They have to go rigid and brown on the bottom first, or else they're just gonna mash up when you try to stir them. These are small pieces, so after just like 15 minutes total in the oven, here we are. So golden brown, they almost remind you of donuts. That is a proper roasty, as the Brits would say.