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I am trying to replicate a recipe that my father-in-law performed once at home… well, not much of a recipe, rather a cooking style, as you'll see.

The idea is to cook new potatoes (specifically, new Ratte potatoes) in a pressure cooker with salt. The potatoes are easy to find (at least here in France), and are quite small: about 5 cm in length. After scrubbing them but leaving the skin on, he put them at the bottom of the pressure cooker, with a little water and quite a bit of sea salt. After a small cooking time (which I estimated at 5 minutes), the potatoes were cooked just enough and crusted with salt.

Now, I have tried that three times myself, and the results were disheartening. The first time, I had put too little water, and burnt the bottom of the potatoes. The second time, there was too much water, and I ended up with regular pressure-cooked potatoes floating in salty water. The third time, I overcooked and while there was no excess of water, half the potatoes has exploded into mashed potatoes (and there was too much salt).

How could I get an idea of how much water, salt and cooking time is needed for this recipe? Trial-and-error is not working very much here, and I have no idea how to figure out these quantities.

PS: it's not relevant to the question, but he made with that an olive oil/coriander/chili sauce that was real good. That I managed to reproduce, at least!

Mien
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F'x
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  • Could you ask your FIL? – Eli Lansey Apr 16 '12 at 20:34
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    @EliLansey that'd be cheating, wouldn't it? more to the point, I did ask, and he said *“yeah, you shouldn't put to much water, but not too little either… and cooking time depends on the quantity of potatoes, so just do it the way you feel it, it’ll work”* – F'x Apr 16 '12 at 20:39

1 Answers1

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The only time I've ever heard of something similar is Salt Potatoes

www.nytimes.com/2008/08/22/travel/escapes/22rNYfood.html

allrecipes.com/recipe/syracuse-salt-potatoes/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_potatoes

but I've never seen them done in a pressure cooker. However, most pressure cooking charts (http://fastcooking.ca/pressure_cookers/cooking_times_pressure_cooker.php for example) list the cooking time of whole new potatoes at about 5-8 minutes. If it was me I would try one of the salt potato recipes and just cook them for less time.

djmadscribbler
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  • That may well be the origin of this recipe because my father-in-law spent a few years in Syracuse a long time ago… Interesting, I'll ask him about it – F'x Apr 17 '12 at 20:44