Homemade dehydrated mashed potatoes?

[Mina Loomis]

Why?  Because I like potatoes to include the skins, and because nearly everything seems to taste better in the version I make at home, vs. factory-made.  But I understand some kinds of foods wouldn’t even exist without industrial processes.  (cf freeze-dried whatevers.)  So with the popularity of instant mashed potatoes for backpacking, it seems reasonable to try to make some from scratch.  Has anyone else tried this?  I found some “prepper” type recipes on the web but you never know about stuff that just turns up on the web so I figured I’d ask here first.

Mina

[Ken Larson]

You may want to give this a try as this is one of many ideas he has:

http://www.backpackingchef.com/

Potato to Bark

Snack on potato bark like a chip while hiking or turn it into mashed potatoes for the evening meal. Create an unlimited number of thick and flavorful one-pot meals by combining potato bark with dried ham, chicken, or ground beef plus dried vegetables of choice. Enjoy plain with salt and pepper or blend additional flavors into it such as barbeque sauce.

 

Ingredients:

2½ lbs Potatoes

16 oz. Fat Free Vegetable, Beef, or Chicken Broth

Salt and Pepper to taste, Garlic Powder optional

 

Yield Dry:

2½ pounds of potatoes yields approx. 2

cups bark weighing 5½ ounces.

 

Peel and boil 2½ pounds of potatoes until soft. Drain.

Mash potatoes with 16 ounces of fat free vegetable, beef, or chicken broth. Because

fats and dairy products don’t dehydrate well and can spoil, do not add any milk or butter. Add salt and pepper to taste and garlic powder, if desired.

Run the mashed potatoes through a blender until creamy.

 

Barbecue Potato Bark Variation:

Substitute 8 oz. of barbeque sauce for 8 oz. of the broth. This will give your meal a fl avor like Brunswick Stew.

 

Dehydrate:

Cover dehydrator trays with Parafl exx® non-stick sheets, parchment paper or the fruit leather inserts that fit your model dehydrator.

Pour a six inch puddle of potatoes and spread about an eighth inch thick with

a spatula. Try to keep the thickness as equal as possible so that the potatoes dry evenly. 2½ pounds of mashed potatoes spread thinly takes up five 15 x 15 Excali-bur trays.

Dehydrate at 135° until potatoes form a brittle sheet, about 8+ hours. Potatoes

spread thickly or with uneven thickness will take longer to dry, but given a few

more hours will turn out fine.

After about six hours of drying, peel the potato sheets off trays and flip them over so that the moister bottom side gets exposed to airflow for the last few hours of drying. If the potatoes don’t peel off easily, wait a little longer before

flipping them over. Dried sheets of potatoes will easily snap into pieces for packing.

[Mina Loomis]

Potato bark!  I’ll try that.  If it works, it looks way more practical than trying to duplicate industrial process.  Thanks!

[Mina Loomis]

Results of first pass:  Made according to the recipe above.  Pretty good texture as dry chips.  Need to work on flavor–used No Beef Base (a brand of bouillon) for stock, and that resulted in a sort of fishy taste, only moderately palatable.  For rehydration, did a bowl with room temperature water and a bowl with boiling water.  Boiling softened sooner.  But both bowls, the potato bark pieces never did disintegrate as one would want if the goal is mashed potatoes.  The bark behaved more like potato “noodles.”  My blender died that day and I still need to get a replacement, so I have yet to see if it acts like mashed potatoes if I grind it up into a powder before rehydrating.  But, primarily need to work on the flavor first.

Mina

[Aaron]

I’ve practically lived off those Idahoan instant mashed potatoes hiking in years past.  At some point I looked at the ingredients and realized they were loaded with additives and trans fat “partially hydrogenated oil”.  A lot of the cheap backpacking food I consumed back in the day seemed to be loaded with those ingredients, which I think are banned now?

I use a similar process to make instant mashed sweet potatoes  There’s a wide variety of sweet potatoes out there, but if you find a naturally tasty variety you don’t need to add much to them.  Instead of boiling them I bake them.  Boiling just extracts flavor and nutrients, and if you’re working with regular potatoes and want to include the skins, definitely bake them.  I do grind the bark down in a blender and it works.  I like the versatility of sweet potatoes.  They can be almost like a dessert, or you can go savory and eat them with something like lentil curry.

[Matthew / BPL]

Sorry to derail but a faux-dal of red split lentils with curry powder and cayenne pepper is perhaps my favorite food ever when you stir in bitter greens like kale or mustard greens and top with some roasted sweet potato cubes. This might make a really nice backpacking dinner.

[Aaron]

+1 for red lentils.  Red lentils are the superior lentil IMO and they cook very fast.   I eat red lentil stews at home all the time, but they’re perfect for backpacking.

[Tipi Walter]

No need to get complicated with this—

Bake several potatoes—either regular or sweet potatoes.

Mash with fork on dehydrator tray sheets.

Dry and ziplock.

Reconstitute in field by adding to soups etc etc.  Here’s a pic—(you can do the same with baked butternut squash)—

[Tipi Walter]

Aaron says—

“+1 for red lentils. Red lentils are the superior lentil IMO and they cook very fast. I eat red lentil stews at home all the time, but they’re perfect for backpacking.”

For about two months I’ve been on a red lentils kick and always cook up a big pot and then dry in my dehydrator.  They cook fast sort of like quinoa and mix well with my backpacking brown rice after they are dried at home etc.

[Howard Clapsaddle]

As a point of interest, its been found that potatoes are closest to being a sole food that one can live healthily on–but not in the long run. From that I deduce that eating almost exclusively potatoes on trips of just a few days if not weeks is a viable way to go! See http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170224-what-food-would-keep-you-alive-the-longest

[Author]

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