The perfect boiled potatoes: the secret of the Michelin three stars chefs

The boiled potatoes They may seem like a simple recipe to prepare. The most common food in the world, put in the water until it becomes soft. But no, obviously. The pitfalls, even when cooking boiled potatoes are around the corner. Too cooked and therefore almost a puree (which instead must be prepared only and only with the legendary recipe of Joël Robuchon), too hard and raw. Often ugly, sometimes skiing and without particular taste.

To prevent this from happening, there are certainly precautions to follow, and even some Michelin three star secret From which you can take a cue for cooking perfect boiled potatoes.

The first, fundamental element to be taken into consideration is The quality of the potato: In the world there are thousands of varieties, and even without experimenting them all you can try to make the difference (yes, even with a very simple boiled potato), choose some more valuable and tasty, or simply cultivated by someone who works the land in the way agriculture should be done, which we have ended up almost to forget today.

And then, as with any preparation, there is some tricks. For example what what It comes from the Canary Islands, where boiled potatoes are often served as an aperitifaccompanied by one cerveza or a glass of wine. And to bring this little secret to Italy is even one of the fourteen Italian restaurants that can boast three Michelin stars: it is in fact on the social pages of Chef Mauro Uliassi that the simple trick to cook perfect boiled potatoes is shared.

“We learned to cook the potatoes almost by chance,” reads a Reel of the Uliassi restaurant, three Michelin stars in Senigallia, famous for his sea cuisine. «One day, one of the chefs, Andrea Tarini, returning from the Canaries, says he met a girl and having eaten very well. THEparticular, he had focused on the potatoes, telling us that they were boiled in an extraordinary way: small, wrinkled, delicious, served in bars as an aperitif».

And, even if it may seem curious that just from the cuisine of one of the most esteemed and renowned chefs of Italy, such a simple recipe arrives, this must not amaze: unlike what you think, in fact, It is precisely from the basic preparations, and from the way of making them in the most correct and precise way, that the great dishes of the saddles are born. And often these are traditional recipes, poor preparations recovered and brought perfectly by working on the technique and ability to correct details and errors to improve even the most common cooking. Therefore, it is to be trusted if the Uliassi team shares an apparently trivial recipe such as boiled potatoes, and indeed it is convinced that from today this trick will be able to revolutionize our way of cooking them.

The secret of boiled potatoes

So, what does this secret consist of? Cook the potatoes (with all the peel, of course) in water saturated with salt: For two liters of water, half a kilo of coarse salt. Then they must be cooking for 35/40 minutes (depending on the size of the potatoes) and, when they have gripped, they are ready. The reason? They explain it into the video: normally, during cooking, the potato exchanges its mineral salts with water, losing them. Instead, since it is in this case of water already saturated with salt, this dispersion does not take place and the potato holds all its mineral salts.

But be careful, there are two further precautions to keep in mind: being very salted water, The peel of the potatoes must be absolutely integratedso that the pulp is not affected by salt (for the same reason, to see if they are ready, they don’t have to prick with the forkbut feeling with your hands to understand the consistency). And then they must remove from the water immediately completed the cooking …