My Method of Boiling Potatoes Turned My Potato-Skeptic Wife Into a Lifelong Spud Lover

Early on in my relationship with my wife, she declared she didn’t care much for potatoes. I, in turn, declared I would make it my life’s work to change her mind. I started with all the obvious recipes, frying them, roasting them, baking them into a creamy gratin. She’d say they were good, but also that they hadn’t really changed her mind. Then I boiled some, and—I swear I’m not kidding you—she became a full-fledged potato convert.

It’s an unlikely story, and even typing it up now it hardly makes sense to me, but I will admit: I can boil a mean potato. Much like properly cooking dried beans, there’s an art to boiling potatoes. Most people don’t know that art, and their boiled potatoes are…regular old boiled potatoes. But if you can perfect the technique (and I’ll let you know right now that you can—it’s not hard), your boiled potatoes will become a revelation, inexplicably smooth and creamy and moist and infused with layers of flavor. So good, you’ll want to eat them straight from the pot like a warm, mushy apple.

Of course, the best boiling method depends on the potato’s type, size, and intended use. I’ll walk you through the most important techniques that apply to all boiled potatoes, and then explain how you might want to vary your approach depending on the recipe.

Choosing Potatoes for Boiling

There are thousands of varieties of potatoes, but they can all be divided into two basic types: starchy (or mealy) and waxy. Starchy potatoes include baking potatoes like russets, which have a fluffier, drier flesh when cooked, while waxy potatoes like red potatoes are much more moist, with a denser, silkier texture. Really, though, these are just extremes on a spectrum of starchiness, and different potato types fall at different points along it.

There is no “right” potato for boiling, and just about any kind of potato can and should be boiled. Generally speaking, though, if I’m setting out to boil potatoes and eat them as boiled potatoes (as opposed to, say, boiling potatoes to then turn them into a mash), I will seek out waxier, medium- to low-starch varieties like yellow potatoes or almost any variety of new potato, since true new potatoes tend to be waxier no matter the kind. I find that these potatoes become the creamiest when boiled, with a moist, velvety texture that is delicious even before rich fats and other texture and flavor enhancers are added.

In many cases I also try to reach for smaller potatoes for boiling, since they not only cook up more quickly but also more evenly given their smaller size, though this assumes you’ll be boiling them whole. If you think you’ll be dicing them first, the size of the potato becomes less important.

The Best Method for Basic Boiled Potatoes

There are many reasons for boiling a potato; it’s often a preliminary step for dishes we don’t think of as boiled like mashed potatoes, french fries, and chips. Let’s assume for the moment that our intention is to boil the potatoes so we can eat them as boiled potatoes. These are the key steps, in brief, and why they’re important:

• Cover the potatoes with cold water, and start the cooking from cold. Because potato flesh is delicate and can fall apart once overcooked, it’s very important to cook your potatoes evenly. Dropping them into a pot of boiling water, which is typical of so many other boiled vegetables, is generally not a great idea when cooking potatoes. Instead, you want the potatoes to heat slowly, so that they come up to temperature more evenly from the exterior to the core, and soften throughout at a roughly similar rate.

  Starting cold also gives the potatoes time to pass through a lower temperature range (roughly 120 to 160°F / 50 to 70°C), during which the pectin that holds their cell walls together is strengthened. This helps the potatoes maintain a creamy, cohesive texture instead of turning mushy.

  It’s also important to stir occasionally as the water heats. Because the pot heats from the bottom up, the potatoes closest to the bottom will cook faster than those at the top if left undisturbed. Stirring helps distribute the heat for more even cooking.

• Add more salt than you think. This is especially important when cooking whole, skin-on potatoes, since the skin acts as a barrier that slows salt absorption; under-salting the water will leave them bland inside. I’m pretty aggressive with the salt in my potato water, making it at least as salty as pasta water (which should be around 1 to 2% salinity, or, as I describe it, as salty as your tears), and sometimes even more so—pushing into true “salty as the sea” territory of around 3% salinity.
• Cook at a very gentle simmer. This connects to the start-from-cold tip above: Keeping the water at a gentle simmer slows the cooking time and helps the potatoes cook through evenly.
• Add aromatics. Potatoes are great flavor sponges, and boiling them is an opportunity to infuse them with flavor. I always try to throw some fresh herb sprigs in the pot, especially woodsy herbs such as thyme, sage, or rosemary. Other welcome additions include alliums like garlic, whole black peppercorns, and/or a bay leaf or two. This is a small step that can lead to significantly more delicious boiled potatoes.
• Cook until easily pierced. The potatoes are ready once you can pierce them easily with a cake tester, paring knife, or skewer.
• If you can (and if it makes sense), let them rest in the cooling water. The potatoes are fully cooked through once you can pierce them without obvious resistance, but I find that they continue to improve if you let them hang out in the cooking water as it cools, becoming even more soft and creamy during that time. That said, this is a risky step if you’re cooking cubed potatoes, as they’ll be at much higher risk of overcooking and breaking down as they sit in the hot water (you can still do it, if you cut the heat a little early and let them finish cooking in the water’s residual heat, but it’s not easy timing to get right).
• Optional chilling can help “set” the potato. If you’ve ever refrigerated cooked rice or noticed old bread grow stale, you’ve seen a phenomenon called retrogradation, which refers to the re-crystallization of starch. In practice, what it means is that when chilled, starches that have been cooked until soft will re-harden. This is often undesirable, but in the case of potatoes that have been boiled until silky soft and smooth, giving them a chance to firm up just a bit from chilling can actually give them a texture that is ideal in some situations—say if you want to cut the boiled potatoes up and use them in a potato salad without fear that they will become too smashed when stirred with the other ingredients. This isn’t a required step, and it isn’t necessary in all situations, but it’s a good one to know about that you can factor into the decision-making around your cooking.

To Cut and Peel or Not

There are a few things to consider when deciding whether to cut and/or peel the potatoes before boiling. One is the size of your potato: The larger the potato, the better an idea it may be to cut it. This is because very large potatoes won’t cook as evenly, since it will take longer for the heat to penetrate to the center. Not only that—larger whole potatoes will take longer to cook, which may be an important deciding factor depending on how much time you have to cook. Diced potatoes cook in 15–20 minutes; large whole ones can take up to an hour.

But the size of the potato isn’t the only consideration. Your recipe itself may necessitate cutting the potatoes first or not (fries, potato chips, and roasted potatoes can all have boiling steps that precede the frying and roasting steps, and they must be cut to their proper size from the start for the recipe to work).

Another thing to consider is the impact cutting and peeling has on how a potato will absorb salt, and even how easily it will become mushy and water-logged. Cut potato has more surface area, which means there’s more opportunity for salt to seep in more quickly, and for exteriors to soften and break apart. If you are cutting up your potatoes before boiling, you will want to salt the water less aggressively, and you may want to cook the potatoes at an even more gentle heat to help prevent the exteriors from becoming too soft before the centers are done.

A potato’s skin, while by no means impenetrable, does act as something of a barrier to the water and salt, so keeping the potato whole and the skin on can help mitigate some of the risks of boiling cubed potatoes. The skin also has a flavor all its own that can enhance many dishes.

For all of these reasons, I often look for smaller, skin-on potatoes for boiling—they can be cooked whole and skin-on successfully while providing an insurance policy against some of the risks of boiling cubed potatoes, though, again, this will depend on what your specific plans are for the potatoes.

The Importance of pH

Most of the time when I boil potatoes, I use plain old tap water, which is pretty close to neutral in pH. But it’s worth understanding just what a big impact the pH of the water can have on the potatoes. If you cook the potatoes in acidulated water (low pH), for example, the pectin that helps hold the potato cells together is strengthened, leading to cooked pieces of potato that hold their shape really well. This is very useful for things like french fries, where a pre-boiling step in acidic water ensures fluffy and crisp fries that remain whole and don’t break apart.

On the flip side, adding an alkaline ingredient to the water has the opposite effect, weakening the pectin and causing the potato to break down more quickly. This is very useful for recipes like roasted potatoes, where a simmer in water that’s been made alkaline with baking soda softens the potato’s exterior and helps make a starchy slurry when tossed with oil that crisps and browns beautifully in the oven.

Keep this in mind when you’re boiling your potatoes, in case the addition of acid such as vinegar (to reinforce the potato’s structure) or an alkaline ingredient such as baking soda (to more effectively soften the potato) is helpful.