If you’re still putting potatoes in cold water before cooking, it’s time to learn not to. Bashny.Net

“It’s not for you to cook potatoes!” – mocked Tosei Kislitsyna logger from the Kovrigin brigade in the famous painting “Girls”. Therefore, it is much more difficult to operate a chainsaw than to cook well-known tubers.



Really, just throw peeled potatoes in the water and boil until it's soft. Can you make a mistake here? It turns out that it is possible, and the health consequences can be quite unpleasant. Let’s figure out how much to cook potatoes and how to do it correctly to preserve its benefits.

From potatoes, you can cook dozens of dishes: boil, bake, fry, make dumplings, blisters, pancakes and a lot of other goodies. Most often, we boil a vegetable in pieces or eat in the form of puree - so it is easiest to cook in a hurry.

The theory is simple. In practice, we often miss an important element - the processing temperature of the tubers. In which water to cook potatoes – cold or hot, and why is it so important?



Many of us pour potatoes with room-temperature water and boil them until they are soft. It takes from 25 to 30 minutes, depending on the variety and maturity of the vegetable. It would seem that there is nothing to screw up here. But in fact, using cold water to cook potatoes is harmful.

The fact is that potatoes will lose a lot of nutrients by the time the water boils. These are valuable minerals and vitamins: potassium, magnesium, phosphorus, iron, vitamins A, PP, B1, B5 and B6. At the exit, we will only have starch mass, which will saturate, but will not bring benefits.



How to cook potatoes properly? It is very simple: you need to put potatoes in hot salted water. This will save all valuable substances. And so that the tubers are cooked evenly, it is worth boiling them on a medium fire, not on a strong one.

Pay attention to another important point. To save time, we often peel potatoes a couple of hours before dinner and leave them in cold water to wait for their fate. Admit it, did you do that too? It may sound reasonable, but it actually contains the same error. The longer a potato stays in cold water, the more vitamins and minerals it will lose. For this reason, it is necessary to clean tubers right before cooking.



A few more life hacks.

1. To cook potatoes faster for 5-7 minutes, add a piece of butter to the pan. It will melt, cover the water with a thin film and slow its evaporation. So, the temperature in the pan will rise, and the tubers will cook faster.
2. Exquisite aroma future side dish will add several pieces of onion or slices of garlic, divided in half. You can also put bay leaf or favorite spices in a pan, and sprinkle the potatoes with finely chopped dill.
   
   
   
   
3. If you have indoor plants, do not pour water from under boiled potatoes, especially if it is cooked correctly. Cool it and use it to water your favorite pots. In this nutrient liquid sufficient concentration of magnesium, potassium, phosphorus and iron to replace the purchased feeding. Use potato water once a week, and in early spring and late autumn – twice a month.
4. Potato water can also be used for cooking. The liquid is perfect as a broth for vegetable soup due to the high content of nutrients.

These simple guidelines will help you become a guru in the art of cooking boiled potatoes. What tricks are you using in this case? Share with us in the comments!