Happy New Year, everyone! We are excited about 2025 and are kicking it off with a great harvest related project!
As you all know, your home grown potatoes aren’t going to last forever. Even if you have a proper root cellar, which we don’t. So, before they spoil and start growing those alien eyes, it’s a good idea to preserve your crop!
We generally do two things with our potatoes each year. We make French fries and also hashbrowns. As you see us do with a lot of our preservation, we’re again using blanch and freeze for our preservation method. This gives us convenient zip lock bags of our potatoes to use over the next several months! Simply throw them in the air fryer or a pan, ready to go fries and homestyle frites!
Oh, and since we live in a giant freezer, we always “flash freeze” our fries outside. This extra step helps to make sure your fries aren’t all clumped together when you go to use them. Once they are lightly frozen, we can bag them up and toss them in our freezer.
Sure, you can buy bags of fries and hashbrowns at the store and they aren’t all that expensive. This isn’t exactly a “money printing” technique, preserving 20 to 30 pounds of potatoes is only worth a few bucks. But, using things like this to absolutely maximize your harvests is a great thing to do!
There’s also nothing saying you couldn’t do this with regular old store bought potatoes, either! In fact, we picked up a bag of russets this year as our white potato crop was a bit on the short side. So, if you want to be certain of what’s going into your food and reduce your dependence on mega food manufacturers, this is an excellent way to get a more valuable end product.
Before we do this, we always select out the potatoes that we want to preserve for our next season’s crop. We try to select the largest potatoes we have for our seed potatoes. This selectivity helps increase yields and pushes subsequent year crops towards larger sizes. We store these in a paper bag for the next five months, just to contain the gangly eye business that will ensue!
If you’re curious about that potato slicer, it’s the greatest thing since “sliced potatoes!” We process a lot of food every year, so investing into “purpose built” tools like this is a huge time saver for us. We can slice and dice 30-ish pounds of potatoes, lickety split, with this tool! It does way more than just potatoes, too!
So, hopefully you’re bringing in the new year with joy and are equally excited for our upcoming growing season! We wish you all health, happiness and great harvests in 2025 and beyond!
