Comment by klyrs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by klyrs | Hacker News Reader

First ingredient: two peeled potatoes

> Prepare the potato water. Boil the potatoes in a pot of salted water until soft. Remove them from the pot and reserve the water, which will be used to thicken the sauce. The potatoes can be used for a different recipe.

later on...

> Add parsley, a spoonful of tomato sauce, and a few spoonfuls of the potato water to the pan. Let the sauce reduce.

> Pour the sauce into a blender and add the anchovies and capers. Blend until thick and smooth. Return the sauce to the pan, adding more potato water if too dry.

This is somewhat upsetting. My dad, a professonial cook, would always deride recipes for their use of thickener -- just cook it longer, or add less liquid to begin with! That could apply here... but the second use for the potato water is to thin the sauce! I'm somewhat skeptical of some cooks' generic advice against adding water to a dish; it's perceived to thin the flavor or whatever. But this? It's just potato water! The flavor is nothing to write home about; just use some freaking water!

And what are we going to do with those two potatoes? Oh, set them aside for some other dish. Here's an idea, don't put this on pasta, make some freaking gnocchi and don't wind up with a pair of moldy boiled potatoes in the back of your refrigerator. And we're making a whole pot of potato water for, what, two or three spoonsful? Why not boil it down, and keep the powder for ready us? Or just... use corn starch, dance on my dad's grave. It will be okay.

And don't even get me started on wasting time to peel the potatoes. Quarter, boil, and the skins slip right off.

The sauce does sound tasty, though.

Starches thicken sauce in a way that's quite different from reducing.

Most Italian sauces end up adding some of the pasta water back in at the end. This is starchy water which has two purposes: both to loosen (thin) the sauce, making it spread out to cover the whole dish, and to thicken the sauce by giving it a slightly gluey texture (unappetizing description, I know) that helps it bind together and stick to the pasta.

These two purposes sound like opposites but are not. A tomato sauce that has simply reduced will be both dense and not bind well to the pasta.

(To be sure, reducing also builds flavor, which is why you first reduce and then add starch water.)

Italian here, also cook amateur, can confirm you're correct 100%. It's also to make tomatoes become sweeter and fight their naturally high acidity.

In naples many put sugar in the sauce. We don't do that 200km north in Rome but it's okay.

Starchy pasta water makes tomatoes taste sweeter?

Starch is essentially sugar.

You can also generally buy potato starch if you are absolutely insistent on it being potatoes, it's not particularly hard to source. (Most Asian grocers will have potato starch, as a baseline.)

Not sure I understand.

If you cook anything for long enough, it will dry out. If you cook tomato sauce with potato water, you will eventually evaporate the water out of the potato water and end up with a mixture of potato starch and water. Potato water was used as a thickener before cornstarch became prevalent.

Secondly, this recipe was made for an audience that largely did not depend on refrigeration. Cold cellar storage, yes, but not refrigeration. So they'd have been using those potatoes for something else.

Corn starch in a corn society, potato starch in a potato society. When I was young, the corn starch was the new thing. Everyone was using potato starch before that. (North Sweden)

Also, there are very different types of potatoes. Some contain much more starch that others. My favourite is Mandelpotatis [1], has much more flavour and a bit more starch than the rest sold on the swedish market.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almond_potato

I guess my point is that potato starch used to be the standard of sorts because potatoes can be grown anywhere and stored in cold cellars to last a year. Even my great grandfather in Southeastern Louisiana where the summertime temperatures can reach 38c stored root vegetables in a dark shed covered with earth and sacks for use year-around.

> Or just... use corn starch

I think this may be a remnant of the original recipe, using starch powder for cooking was less popular, I believe.

This is effectively home made potato starch.

It was more fun to write that than attend such details of the historical context.

thickeners are not the same as reducing

About as necessary as a bay leaf, which I have been waging a war against for years…

try with a large handful of fresh ones... not sad dry ones. you can also taste its tea to learn

I believe that a large handful of fresh leaves would influence flavor. My comment is directed at a single dry bay leaf that I have seen on many occasions.

In the US, fresh bay leaves are often not the same plant as the dried bay leaves your recipe expects. Find good dried bay leaves, and/or use more than the recipe asks for.

I can't find info on this, can you share something please? I'm skeptical of bone dry ones being preferable in any case (besides needing to have good sourcing then for imported dried ones). they don't dry like oregano does and I don't know that they are so much worse like most non sicilian oregano

In my experience whenever you have a slow simmering anything and it “feels like something’s missing” – you forgot the bay leaf.

No I have no idea what it actually adds to the flavor. It feels pointless. But skip the leaf and you can always tell.

Like the sibling comment says, make bayleaf tea. Taste it on its own. If you get your bay leaves from the store, you'll probably find it to be incredibly mild. If they're plucked fresh from a bay laurel, there's actual flavor to be had.

Sorry you don't understand what bay leaves do.

They are essential to Cajun cooking and I can immediately taste when they're missing, as can most people.

Double blind trial requested.

Take two cups of hot water, steep a couple bay leaves in one, taste. People act like bay leaves are hard to taste, which is strange; they definitely have a taste.

In water, yes. In a flavorful dish, it depends. On the leaves themselves, on the dish, etc

I’ll try it, thanks.

Grocery store bay leaves are tasteless, at least around where I am. Good ones (I get them from Penney’s) are highly flavorful and add a noticeable flavor to soups and sauces. I even found myself thinking that I’d put too much bay leaf in a pot of beans once, it was threatening to overwhelm the other flavors.

I did not now that at leaf denialism was a thing. I use it regularly with roasts and stews, and it’s fine. I can see how one could not like its taste, but going on a crusade or being upset about other people using it sounds a bit much.

Not upset, just joking around about an ingredient that I haven’t personally seen bring a lot of added flavor to a recipe, but given the passionate responses, I might have to reconsider my position.

Fair enough! I can agree to disagree :)

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