Why Canned Potatoes Should Be Your New Secret Shortcut For Soups And Stews (No One Will Know)

Soups and stews are the wonderful, one-pot meals with prep and cook times that easily betray their supposedly simple conceit. Sure, you might only dirty one piece of cookware, but all the chopping, sauteing, browning, deglazing, and whatever else your recipe calls for sure amounts to a lot of work. If you're starting with scratch-made stock or broth, that can practically double the equation. Is it ultimately worth it to create a nourishing bowl of soothing love? Yes. And little else says "I love you" more than a kitchen shortcut that gets dinner on the table just a little faster while making the home cook's life just a little easier. Canned potatoes are just what your preparations have been waiting for, and they can even be indistinguishable from fresh.

A typical beef stew recipe, for example, might call for you to scrub, dry, peel, cut, and simmer potatoes until they're soft. In potato talk, that last part alone can take more than half an hour. Do you know what's already been put through the same paces to render nice and tender? Canned potatoes. You might want to rinse them and cut them down to your desired size, but they're otherwise ready to go virtually immediately, with the same texture and neutral flavor notes. Keep a few cans handy in the larder or pantry and it's also one less thing to think about when you're shopping for ingredients.

If you're already imagining a whole shortcut stew, than you've got the spirit of culinary innovation in you. But just tossing together a bunch of canned ingredients isn't going to work. The carrots, onion, and celery in the mirepoix that begins a lot of soups and stews need to actually cook in a bit of fat to begin developing the flavor that you're going to keep building with aromatics, spices, and seasonings until the finish line. The potatoes will add their own crucial texture and even thicken things up a bit thanks to their starch, but they aren't exactly star ingredients in this case, so canned is fine.

If you've ever swapped canned potatoes in something like a salade Niçoise and been as disappointed by the flavor as we have, you don't need to worry about that in most soup or stew cases, either. In the salad, there was nowhere to hide. But, unless "potato" appears in your soup or stew's title, it's probably going to be obscured by all of your other carefully crafted elements. This might seem like kind of a big risk for a recipe that might take all day, but try canned potatoes and you just might add using fresh ones to your list of avoidable beef stew mistakes.