How to ensure that potatoes disintegrate in stews or casseroles

Question

I am not a very good cook.

I have tried making stews or casseroles. I put meat, vegetables and potatoes in a casserole dish in the oven, a slow cooker, or on the hob in a low heat.

Sometimes the potatoes dissolve, and give me a delicious thick sauce. Very nice. Quite often, though, I'm left with tasteless white lumps in water. Not nice at all.

I can't work out what I did differently. Maybe the variety of potato, or the other ingredients.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

The effect you are looking for is not congruent with typical preferences. Most cooks and eaters, on finding that the potatoes have disintegrated in their stew, would call them "overcooked". So you cannot rely on recipes to produce this result - most are geared towards having potatoes remain in distinct cubes.

There are a few factors you can tweak to get closer to your preferred kind of stew.

1. Acid. Make sure that your stew doesn't contain any acid, or the potatoes will stay firm. For this purpose, you should count not only acid seasoning such as vinegar, but also any form of tomato, and any milk, cream, cultured dairy and fresh cheese. Semi-hard and hard cheeses (cheddar, gouda or firmer) are OK. For taste, you can add sourness after the cooking time is over.
2. Potato variety. Potatoes come in three broad categories - "firm", "mealy" and "mixed" or "all-purpose". Use the mealy ones.
3. Cooking time You have to cook for a really long time until the potatoes fall apart. If your recipe suggests a cooking time, start checking at that time and after that every half hour until you see the result, for maybe up to 5-6 hours - if it hasn't happened by then, I don't think it will happen later. The temperature shouldn't have any direct effect on the disintegration part, but for purely practical purposes, such long cooking is done with low temperatures, as low as you can get while still having your food gently simmering.
4. Size As Greybeard said, if you cut them up smaller, they will fall apart quicker.
5. Heat source Once heated, the oven is great for low and slow food - but it does take a long time until the food is heated enough to start cooking. I have stopped using raw potatoes in potato-based casseroles, since it frequently takes 3+ hours to get them to cook through (in the "distinct pieces" sense). The hob is a better place, but more difficult to manage over the long time. As you mentioned a slow cooker, it will be easiest to learn how to do it consistently there. If there are oven recipes you really like, give them even more extra time, or parboil the potatoes before assembling the casserole. I would peel, then boil - skin-on potatoes have always seemed to soak up less water to me, and you can make use of the "cut smaller" effect too.

On a side note, if you like this kind of sauce, you might consider ranging out into recipes that use more conventional thickeners for stew. It will be a different taste, but will allow you more flexibility, both with shorter cooking times, and with the ability to add sour ingredients.

Answer 2

Depending on the cooking heat level, variety and size of potato you are using, the time taken to cook potato will vary enormously, from 20 to over 40 minutes. As a rough guide, about 1½ inch white potato cubes will take about 20 minutes at a gentle simmer, much longer in a lower temperature slow cooker.

One of the benefits of cooking vegetables in a liquid is that they will absorb some of this cooking liquid as they cook, and you can use this to your advantage in judging the "doneness" of your veg etc. For instance, as the colour of a white potato gets closer to the surrounding stock, this is a good indication that it is cooked.

So for best results, I would stagger the timings when adding ingredients to the pot, adding the toughest, longest cooking items first and the most fragile, quickly cooked ingredients last:

1. Meat with bone in
2. Tough root vegetables (e.g. carrots, swede, parsnip)
3. Potatoes, onions etc.
4. Shelled peas, individual sweetcorn pieces etc.

Depending on the cooking method, the size of the veg, the gap between adding each item may be as short as 20 minutes and as long as an hour or more. It is important to note that size will have a major bearing on cooking times as well, thickly sliced carrot will take longer to cook than finely chopped which will take longer than grated carrots.

So, as a general rule:

1. Smaller pieces cook quicker, larger pieces cook longer
2. Higher temperatures cook quicker, lower temperatures cook slower
3. What is being cooked will differ considerably as well, sweet potato will cook differently from white potato for instance.

Answer 3

One thing I've done in the past, when slow cooking stews (either in a slow cooker or an oven) is to mash some of the potato and return it to the sauce.

This would have been a meat, veg, and potato stew, with no tomato or just a little puree added after browning the meat and veg. The liquid was stock and quite possibly ale. Towards the end of cooking, if it was a bit runny, I'd take out a few chunks of potato and possibly other root veg, mash them with a fork and stir them back in. Obviously this doesn't get rid of all your white lumps, but it does fix the sauce. You can taste at the same time, adding herbs and black pepper, or other seasonings to suit. But you might want to be more generous with the initial seasoning if you find the potato tasteless.

Answer 4

If you want the potatoes to not be solid chunks in your stew, don’t use chunks.

Stew everything else, and then when you’re about 20-30 minutes away from everything else being cooked, add grated potato.

The extra surface area will help them break down quickly (assuming you don’t have acid in there) and thicken the liquid. I typically hold back a potato or two to do this, even when I’ve added larger potato chunks in the stew.

‘Floury’ is what I believe they call baking / mealy potatoes in the UK, and those will break down easier than waxy / roasting / boiling potatoes.