Sunday, November 22, 2009

Just in Time for Thanksgiving — Keeping Cut Potatoes from Getting Brown

With Thanksgiving coming up this week, and all the meal preparations that go along with it, and Christmas just around the corner, I thought it might be helpful to share a tip with you from a few months ago. This might come in handy when you need to prepare some foods ahead of time because Thanksgiving Day can become a very busy one in the kitchen.

I have been known to cut up my potatoes that I'll be using for dinner earlier in the day. Sometimes I do it for convenience, and sometimes I do it because I'll be gone from the house until right before it's time to start cooking dinner and I don't have time for the actual preparation. The problem is that the potatoes will turn brown soon after you cut them.

The solution: place them into a bowl of cold water, cut up or whole, and put them into the refrigerator until you are ready to use them. You can even leave them there overnight.

You can't tell too much with the potatoes still in the water, but this is what the water looked like as soon as I took the potatoes out, which in this particular instance was after about three hours in the water:

As yucky as that looks, my potatoes were still pretty. Here's what they looked like as soon as I put them in the hot pan (I was frying potatoes this time, but this week we might all be making mashed potatoes):

As perfect as if I just cut them!

Hope this makes your Thanksgiving food preparations a little easier.

8 comments:

Mari said...

I've done this before and it's a great way to get something done ahead of time!

Betsy Brock said...

Love this tip...thank you! I'm doing this Thursday for sure!

Unknown said...

I just wanted to let you know that the link for Crock Pot Wednesday is already up. I thought everyone would have a very busy Thanksgiving week, so I got an early start. Thanks so much for posting to CPW last week.

Unknown said...

Thank you for this great tip!

Have you ever heard of shelf milk? If you have...have you ever used it in recipes?

Moore Minutes said...

Genius idea! Thank you. :)

Kayren said...

Rona~
I haven't used shelf stable milk before, but I looked it up online and found a couple of good resources for you to check out. It says that it is regular milk, just pasteurized at a higher temperature before being put in a sterile container, and it doesn't have to be refrigerated until it is opened, giving it a longer shelf life and easier transportation to store shelves and homes. It does recommend a certain temperature range for non-refrigerated storage for the best results.

You can click here and here for more information.
~Kayren

Kayren said...

Okay, so the links didn't come through, so I'll just show them entirely:

http://bordenshelfstablemilk.com/borden/borden_SSMFAQ.htm

http://www.diversifiedfoods.com/ShelfStableMilk.htm

Unknown said...

Thanks you for the links. I definitely plan on sharing them and providing link back to your site.

 
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