I get more emails about dehydrating mashed potato than anything else!
I’ve written about this previously, under the carbohydrate section. I’ve never really been able to get a result quite the way I wanted it. I always ended up with a lump of cardboard that didn’t rehydrate that easily. Until last night that is!
I was thinking about drying some mash when I had a brainwave. I boiled the potatoes in the normal way and then put them through a ricer, delivering the shreds of potato on a dehydration sheet. The riced potato was then dried and what I ended up with was lots of dry, tiny, pellets. A far better result and a far better product to work with.
Ricers are like big garlic presses and can be used to push through potato and root vegetables. I might try a combination of potato, swede and carrot next. Normally, ricers give you a very light and fluffy mash almost automatically.
Just to recap. Avoid using fat or oil in your mash if you are going to dehydrate it. To give some flavour, cook the potatoes in milk (or 50/50 milk and water) and add some garlic cloves (these are easily riced) and a bayleaf (removed before ricing). The milk does give added taste (although I didn’t use it last night) and will give you something akin to the superior French varieties of dried potato.
A ricer would seem to be the answer!
I tried using a ricer, and it worked really well. It took quite a time to rehydrate though. I added the required amount of boiling water and stired it with a spoon. By the time it was ready though, it was cold. Luckily I was eating it with something with lots of liquid, so I just added spoonfulls of the potato to that which heated it up again.
How do you rehydrate yours?
I had no problem on in Scotland for two weeks. You do need to employ the Pot Cozy method though. Bring to boil, place pot in cozy and allow to simmer for 20 minutes.
Alternatively bring to the boil, switch of gas and wait 20 mins. Bring back to the boil again.
Should be OK. Never fails for me,
Pot cozy materials can be bought from backpackinglight.co.uk or you can follow Colin Ibbotson’s method which you can find in the esbit stove piece in his pages — link on right had navigation bar.
I’m going to try adding some of those Lakeland Butter Buds to the potatoes, as they make a yummy taste but have apparently had the oils removed. Yum, thanks!