Cooking potatoes - baking covered in salt for mashing

I was wondering about a detail of a recipe I recently read in a magazine.

The recipe is for Gnocchi, so basically it's about making a potato mash dough.

Instead of just boiling the potatoes, the recipe was roughly like:

Put the whole, unpeeled potatoes into a large casserole, cover them wholly with ample stone salt, and slowly bake them for 2 hours. (... then peel cooked potatoes and put them through a ricer ... ...)

What gives? I'd just put them into a steamer and cook them, what's the point of putting them into the oven for 2 hrs covered with salt?

(Note: It was a recipe from a posh restaurant, so it may well be more complicated than necessary :-)

Here is the original (german) recipe for reference.

Best Answer

The only answer that makes any sense (other than the "just for show" hypothesis) is that baking in salt does create a fluffier potato. That assertion is backed up by Cook's Illustrated and the Idaho Potato Commission [citation]. So, for the lightest possible gnocchi, start with the fluffiest possible potato.

I've got to say though, roasting potatoes in salt for gnocchi would be too fussy even for me.

EDIT: One other possibility just occurred to me, and the more I think of it, the more I think it's the key. Maybe the restaurant always bakes potatoes that way and it's just as easy to add extra for the gnocchi or to use leftovers. So, they wrote the recipe the way they actually do it.

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Can I use baking potatoes for mash?

Choose the Right Potatoes For light and fluffy mashed potatoes, choose Russetts. That's right, just plain old basic baking potatoes. They have little moisture and tons of starch, so, if treated right, they will mash up as light and fluffy as can be.

Should I salt potatoes before baking?

Salting before or after clearly makes a difference. The outside of the post-salted potatoes is more crispy and has a nice bite to it, whereas the outside of the pre-salted potatoes is tough and leathery.

Why do you bake potatoes on salt?

Burying potatoes in a bed of hot salt makes them steam in the moisture they exude as they bake, so they turn out moist, fluffy and cooked evenly all the way through; simple, earthy and elemental all at once.

Do you add salt to water when boiling potatoes for mashed potatoes?

As with pasta water, there's a reason to liberally salt the water in which the potatoes will cook: As the starches in potatoes warm up, they open up and absorb water (and salt if you season the water). When they're finished cooking, the cells close off.

Salt Crusted Baked Potatoes | Food Channel L Recipes

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