If you’re a food garden dork, like myself, you may have run into this weird situation wherein you cook up a bunch of potatoes, and for some reason, some of them don’t… cook. They get hot, they turn brown, but they stay crunchy and taste either bad or like nothingness.
This is, I just learned today after making a whole pan of them, called glassy potatoes.
So what causes glassy potatoes, Mr. Smartypants? Well, I’ll tell you. After a little research, I learned that they are caused by “secondary growth” of potatoes. That makes sense. I mentioned that I was harvesting the All Blues that came up from some I’d left in the ground from last year? Two of them were sort of “scabby” on the outside. Being a depression-era mentality type, I decided to “cut off the bad parts” and cook those up first so that my family wouldn’t have to look at them for dinner.
Indeed, they were sort of watery and translucent on the inside. Otherwise, they looked pretty normal and weren’t soft or discolored. I threw them into a cast iron frying pan with some onions and a couple of pounds of butter to make some fried potatoes.
Much later, they didn’t feel very soft. Still, they were all nice and brown and crunchy on the outside. In goes the cheese, and a couple big shredded leaves of collards. Heart attack special– Southern Style.
The first bite was quite a let down. Crunch. Oh, that one must have defied thermodynamics and not cooked like the rest of them. Nope. Crunch, crunch, crunch. Blech.
I’ve read that if you prepare a salt-water bath, you can tell a glassy potato because it will float where the ones that still contain some starch (that’s the problem, no starch left) will sink. Seems to me, though, that knowing what I do now, it’d be pretty easy to see that characteristic crunchy, watery, translucence that you see when you cut into it.
So, if there’s any chance that your homegrown spuds are “second growth” (e.g., they’re from a volunteer patch, you saved some from earlier, they look particularly scabby compared to the rest), cut into them and look for the signs. If they look to be glassy, toss them.
I have some tall broccolini. It’s flowering but it doesn’t look ready to eat. When can I expect to be able to eat the stuff?
Blech! I’ve never had this experience, never want to have this experience, and hope with all my might that your family never has to have this experience again.
I hope you didn’t make that cute little sad boy eat them. Or the one that tested the apple still on the tree. Or the wife that eats the first ripe raspberry.
Yes, blech. Luckily for them, I took the bullet. In fact, you’ll notice that I was trying to spare them even the aesthetic unpleasantness of scabby spuds.
Hi Bryan, well, that’s a bit of a non sequitur, but I’ve never grown actual broccolini (which isn’t really broccoli, as such, so it never gets the big head on it). It’s sort of notorious for being trademarked and difficult to obtain. Where’d you get your seeds?
Anyway, you can eat it whenever. You can eat the flowers, too. Whenever I’ve grown similar things (rapini, raab, etc.) I usually lose interest in them when they start to get all leggy and stupid looking.
Makes me think I should try again.