Sorry about the thread title. I just don’t know what else to call it.
Monday night I took a package of spareribs out of the freezer, to make ribs Tuesday. My plan was for a barbecue sauce that the family likes. My husband… I am not sure his plan, but he chopped them up into single rib units, added potatoes and carots and put them in the slow cooker, with water, salt and pepper. I guess an hour later he decided that wasn’t going to fly, took the ribs out, (put them in a bowl in the fridge) and left the mess in the slow cooker. In the morning I just stuck the bowl into the fridge, figuring I would deal with it later…throwing out or salvaging, whatever.
Fast forward to dinner time, I discover we are out of potatoes, and decide to fish out the spuds from the slow cooker. These oness that have been marinating in an icky mix of sparerib juice since midnight the previous night. I figured I would boil them up hard, then make mashed potatoes.
These potatoes did not cook. I boiled them for the usual 20 and kept going. Not done at 30. Not done at 35 minutes. At the 45 minute mark they could be sliced with the edge of a fork but the starch hadn’t broken down and they were still kind of hard. At this point I gave up, tossed them in a pan and made home fries. When the outsides became a golden brown I pulled them out. Many still had not fully cooked. We enjoyed the ribs and coleslaw, and pretty much ignored the potatoes.
So, what happened here. Was it the cooking cooling cycle? Was it sitting in a broth of rib and connective tissue? Was it some fault of the russet potatoes themselves? Does anyone have any ideas as to why these potatoes became impervious to cooking?
“These oness that have been marinating in an icky mix of sparerib juice since midnight the previous night.”
Perhaps the overnight marinating could have caused a really hard outer coating that didn’t let the water absorb, and thus the inside part of the potatoes remained uncooked?
Actually - this sounds interesting and wonder how I could use this concept…perhaps make mashed potato “balls”, let them marinate all night and get that thick coating, and then boiling them? Sort of the “M&M” of potatoes - melts in your mouth, not on your plate!
How long did the ribs and potatoes cook before he took the ribs out? Did he turn off the cooker at that point, and the potatoes were cold in the marinade all night?
The potatoes were russets, peel still on, chopped into say 1 inch pieces. Apparently the slow cooker was on low for about an hour, (and the cooker really takes a while to heat) then he thought… “What If I am just making sparerib stew?” and took the whole mess apart, ribs in the fridge and everything else just sitting on the counter. I would have tossed the whole lot out but yesterday was busy, and then at the end of the day, with my nice oven cooked ribs in bbq sauce ready to eat I realized he had made a mess of our last potatoes. Thus, my attempts to rescue them rather than just put into a compost bin or something.
(In retrospect I could have sent him to the store then made mashed potatoes and we still would have been eating before the nasty raw starch pan fries were served.)
I wondered if it was some property of the connective tissue in ribs maybe… I don’t know. The potatoes were not green, the others in this same purchased lot cooked up nicely, nothing unusual about them.
I’ve had potatoes that would never get done.
It’s happened to my mother, my grandmother, and friends.
I don’t know why it happens but you can cook them all day and they are still hard.
He makes home made french fries for us. And terrible terrible scrambled eggs. He will even make my son an incredible, inedible waffle from time to time, and allows the boy to drench it in syrup to “make it tasty.” He makes nasty coffee to give me when I have to get up for a 7 am shift, usually he passes me the coffee before my feet hit the floor.
Good intentions, not always the greatest results. And yes, he’s a keeper.
Its like the banana that never ripens. I think I learned it here, about bananas getting chilled in transit and never ripen. I used to argue “No, its not plantain, it is a banana that won’t ripen.” It happens, occasionally, and until I learned about the chilled bananas that just don’t ripen after that, I would wonder why the duds?
And yest, this was a dud potato or two. (These were enormous russet potatoes, about 7 or 8 inches long by about 4 inches in diameter, so he only used two.) Even the colour never turned to that beige-white of a cooked potato, there was still that silky textured shiny whiteness of uncooked starched , both in the boiled and fried potatoes.
And now, as of this thread, I have spent more time thinking about the colour of potatoes than I ever have in my life.
Wow, Leaffan, thanks that describes exactly what happened. The low temperature not enough to boil pre-cook then the starch set for 16 or so hours, and I ended up with these weird non-cooking potatoes.
On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee agrees with Leaffan. It says that some fruits and vegetables won’t soften if they are preheated to 130-140 degrees F (55 - 60 C) for 20 to 30 minutes. These include potatoes, sweet potatoes, beets, carrots, beans, cauliflower, tomatoes, cherries and apples. Heating to this temperature range activates an enzyme in the cell walls that changes the pectin in the cell walls so it cross-links with calcium more easily. The heat also causes calcium to be released, and the pectin that links with it becomes less prone to breaking down at higher temperatures. This same enzyme is inactivated at temperatures above 160 F (70 C).
I don’t understand why he just didn’t leave the cooker on, after removing the meat, and just cook the rest of the veggies that were in there anyway. Seems wasteful.
