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From our new podcast network, The Genius Recipe Tapes is lifelong Genius hunter Kristen Miglore’s 10-year-strong column in audio form, featuring all the uncut gems from the weekly column and video series. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss out.
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It has always seemed like the logical way to do things. I don't want to waste butter, and potatoes are a variable product that might need more or less liquid to achieve the right consistency.
I also like to make lemon mashed potatoes by adding a little lemon zest and a splash of lemon olive oil - the best choice being Stone House Lisbon Lemon Olive Oil (Stone House is based in Berkeley California - they press the olives with whole lemons making the oil deliciously lemony). The lemon olive oil and zest add a subtle lemon accent to the mashed potatoes, which is great served with grilled meat or poultry.
Following the directions and with the Pate a Choux ready she instructed me to mix equal parts of the Gluey Potatoes with the Pate a Choux, in other words 50/50, and I did.
Once mixed I was instructed to heat vegetable oil to 375 degrees, handed two tablespoons and shown how to scoop and drop dollops of the mixed “batter” into the hot [375 degrees] oil. The croquette shaped (oval) dollops bobbed in the oil, puffed up and very quickly turned golden brown. Once removed from the oil and laid upon a cut open brown paper bag they were salted and allowed to cool to the touch.
Our instructor’s French training truly saved the night as the gobs of ghostly white glue turned out to be my most memorable lesson of seeing a pro keep her cool and turn a potential disaster into the most sought after dish of the evening. None remained when we finished dinner that night.
A local Cordon Bleu trained chef offered a French cooking class in her home years ago and I enrolled to check my understanding of what I’d self-taught myself from Julia Child’s books.
During the first night’s class a recently retired, newbie to cooking, male gentleman was given the task of preparing mashed potatoes. He peeled them, cut them to size, cooked them to softness, drain them, let them cool just a bit and then, becuz he’d seen his wife use her food processor at his home, filled the teacher’s processor to the brim. Lid on, unit on, and ever-so-quickly he successfully (sic) produced a container of glue.
When he proudly shows his handy work to our teacher she burst out in laughter and announced to the class “We’ve No Mash Potatoes tonight Class, Instead We’ll be having Potatoes Dauphine…”, and with that she handed me a cookbook and asked me to prepare a recipe of Pate a Choux.
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