Tater Tots - A Discourse In Failure

Coming from a background in the hard sciences, I sometimes wondered why there weren't publications dedicated to failure. A negative result can often be as important as a positive result, it's just not as exciting. Plus, you can learn a lot from a negative result, and you could even avoid someone else's.

This is a negative result.

Tater Tots were one of the earlier recipes I wanted to do. But they're complicated, so I put it off. I finally decided to try it during one of the Northeast blizzards.

Here was my idea. Take whole potatoes, chop them up very small and par-boil them, bind with a little flour and egg, fry and salt.

The result looked like this.

Looks pretty good. A little irregular, but they could easily pass as homemade tater tots. Here's the problem. They tasted awful.

Here's the procedure I used.

Peel two whole potatoes.

Brunoise, the potatotes, and either save the ends for another use, or discard them.

Par-boil (partially cook them in boiling water) then drain.

Now whip up an egg with a little flour to thicken, and then drop a spoonful of the potato in the egg to bind it into a tater-tot like shape.

Fry it in hot oil until brown and crispy, and then salt as soon as you take it out.

The result was dense, eggy, and chewy. Not the light, fluffy, crispy and salty tater tots we know and love.

Some thoughts as to what went wrong: I didn't fry them twice. You often see fries fried twice. Once to make a fluffy inside, once to crisp the outside. I used too much egg to bind it, hence the eggy flavor. I also probably cut the potato too big, which meant that there was more room for egg between pieces of potato. 

I hope we all took something away from this, not the least of which is that anyone can make a recipe that falls flat on its face.

Comments

[Brian]

Yeah, most tater tots I've seen have been shredded. If you have a food processor with a shredding disc, that is definitely the easy way, but a hand grater will work as well.

Double frying may be difficult with tots because of the non-potatoey bits, so I liked your par-cook idea. Steaming or microwaving the shredded potatoes, letting it cool, then forming into tots and frying would probably work well.