I drive a Prius and have a very long commute which goes through a rather conservative area. My existence inadvertently pisses off so many big truck drivers. I’ll never understand why some people need to speed up and pass me immediately after I’ve passed them. It’s not a competition!
Wow, no one saw that one coming!
/s
Because they were brainwashed into believing they’re somehow valuable and a good investment that retains its value, despite them actually being neither of those.
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They don’t care about credibility, rule of law, consistency, or even hypocrisy. They want their team to win at all costs and are stupid enough to not see the consequences of their actions.
Great question. Osmosis will be minimal when the total concentration of solutes in the potato’s cells matches the total concentration of solutes outside of the potato’s cells.
The problem here is twofold. First, the solute concentration in the potato is quite high as it’s low moisture and is comprised of starches, sugars, minerals, and other cell contents, so you need a ton of salt in the water to match the total concentration. Second, even if the solute concentrations are equal, making your boiling water an isotonic solution, you still have to deal with simple diffusion. The cooking process is blowing up cell walls, so some starch is going to migrate out while salt moves in to take its place. By mass, you don’t need to add much salt to a potato to make it unpalatable. You’d probably be alright with a whole potato but cut up potato pieces would end up really salty.
Unless you’re salting so heavily that the end product is inedible, it shouldn’t make a big difference. You’d need a pretty high salt concentration to make the water isotonic or hypertonic when compared to the potato.
Ahhh, the old “I offended someone on the Internet when I made fun of them, so I made fun of them again then blamed them for all of it when they said something”.
At first I figured you were just being an asshole. It happens, people have bad days or phrase things poorly. Then you proved you weren’t just being an asshole - you actually ARE an asshole.
I now see my mistake: I made a post that addresses a problem that you’ve never had and failed to remember that the world is no greater than your experience. I clearly am the worst kind of person and deserve your criticism.
My thanks also for your public service of mocking people trying to be helpful or educational on the Internet. You truly exemplify how actions taken by those in anonymity speak volumes of their character.
Imagine being the kind of person that, presumably as an adult, you think it’s cool to mock people on the Internet. I hope that made you feel better about yourself.
Edit: JFC, you’re the original comment guy, AKA the quintessential “well, ackshally” ex-Redditor. You’re just upset because I pointed out that you can’t read, then you proved it a second time.
Aww, thanks! It’s by far the most Lemmy thing I’ve ever done.
We cater to our strengths now. I cook and organize, she cleans.
I never thought I’d open such a can of potato tuberworms. To be fair, I also overthink potatoes and just about damn near everything else too.
Just to preface, I’m actively trying to not be the “well, ackshally” guy. I’m just really passionate about potatoes and potato education. Really just science education but potatoes are science, dammit.
The part you quoted, when in the context of the rest of the post, describes how boiling them whole specifically allows you to leave them in the pot without them getting soggy. You can leave them in there for an extended length of time as the amount of water they’ll absorb relative to their total volume is minimal due to the low surface area to volume ratio, plus the intact skin severely reduces the rate of water absorption.
Here’s where the well ackshally avoidance part is important. I have an MSc in botany, so I took a lot of plant physiology courses, plus I wrote a paper about this as a “fuck you” response to a stupid assignment by an asshole professor. The following is a crash course on potato science, no one is under no obligation to read it.
It’s not overcooking itself that causes soggy taters. When you cook a potato, the starch absorbs water and swells. When you cook a whole potato, the amount of water available is rather limited as potatoes are low moisture tubers, so the starch can only absorb as much water as is available in the tater itself. When boiled whole, the periderm (skin) maintains the structure of the potato, keeping it from breaking apart, and limits the amount of water that can be absorbed into the pith, the starchy interior. The latter is actually one of the primary natural functions of the skin. The total moisture content of a boiled whole potato is shockingly close to its raw state. Don’t believe me? Weigh a few whole taters using a decent scale, boil them for an hour, then weigh them again. It’ll be damn near the same. That’s one of the perks of cooking them my way - I can add more milk and butter without them getting soggy.
When you cut potatoes up, the starch can maximally swell as it has practically unlimited access to water, plus vastly more surface area, increasing the rate of water absorbtion. Since the skin no longer maintains the shape of the potato, small fissures appear as the structure of the pith begins to degrade. These further increase the surface area, consequently increasing water absorbtion even more, which further increases pith degradation. It’s this excessive water absorption by starch that leads to a gluey consistency and being cut up facilitates absorbtion through these mechanisms. This is also why wax potatoes are more resistant to falling apart than floury potatoes when boiled, as the starch content of a wax potato is much lower. Side note: I actually prefer a 1:1 ratio of wax to floury potatoes in my mash.
A way to test and verify is to boil up some spuds using your preferred method and mash them as normal, but add a fair bit more than normal of hot water, milk, or another primarily water based liquid, i.e., not cream or butter. You’ll end up with a gluey tater paste.
To be totally transparent, I never had gummy mash until my wife and I got together. She used to boil her potatoes, let them sit in the hot water until closer to dinner, then whip them with beaters. She’s from Ireland, I joke that the potato blight was a failed preemptive strike to prevent her from ever touching a potato.
I think the only SMH worthy shit here is you being needlessly critical and condescending. Take your bad attitude out on someone else.
SMH
I usually don’t wish violence on anyone, but I wouldn’t mind seeing Musk made into douchebag tartar.
So just a continuation of the motor vehicle industry sabotaging public transportation so people have to buy more vehicles.
Capitalist ‘innovation’ at its finest!
I saw it not coming at Hyperloop speeds!
I think it’s useful. It’s not uncommon for people to not pick up on written sarcasm. I actually think we should adopt diacritics that denote emotion. Like emojis but more systematic.