Hump-Day Quickie: Potato Fudge-- or, You'd never believe it's microwaved!

Our heatless cooking continues!

Prince Edward Island Potato Fudge 300g chocolate chips ⅓ cup warm mashed potatoes (just the potatoes, no added milk/butter/etc) 2 tbsp melted butter 1 tsp vanilla ⅛ tsp salt Up to 4 cups powdered sugar (viz. icing sugar) Have a greased 8" pan ready. Melt the chocolate. You can use a double boiler, or melt it in a large bowl in the microwave- stopping and stirring every 20 seconds. Mix the mashed potatoes and butter. Then mix them into the chocolate, along with the vanilla and salt. Mix in about half of the powdered sugar. Gradually add more until the fudge is about the right consistency and sweetness. You may have to set down the spoon and mix with your hands. Press into the pan. Cut into squares, then chill until firm. -Canadian Potato Museum, Prince Edward Island

...all right, so strictly speaking a microwave isn't heatless. The food in there does in fact get hot. But a microwave doesn't produce enough heat for the air conditioning to notice. At any rate, today we are making potato fudge. 

Apparently our recipe comes from the Canadian Potato Museum on Prince Edward Island. Those of us in the "Land of the Free" may know Prince Edward Island (if we've heard of it at all) as the home of Anne of Green Gables, but apparently in Canada it's also known for potatoes. Which makes me deeply regret that I haven't gone there in any of my northerly travels.

Mid-Century Menu

Anyway, someone on the Mid-Century Menu group shared this with everyone. I was skeptical, but then they shared pictures of the fudge itself. 

Since this recipe is very easy to cut down to a quarter of its original amount, I decided to add something special to it: Star anise! As the kids apparently say these days, we're sleeping on star anise in fudge. I can only add it to very small fudge batches because most people complain, but I think everyone should try it. However, I didn't think our coffee grinder could successfully pulverize entire star anise pods, so I prised the seeds out of them. They look like egg-cases from some household pest, don't they?

Meanwhile in the microwave, our chocolate had not melted but turned into a hot clay. I actually know why this happened-- it's that spoonful of butter. All butter contains a small amount of water (or, if you want to sound cheffy, all butter contains a small amount of moisture content). If you add a tiny drop of water to melted chocolate, it seizes into hard clumps and no amount of heat will make it melt again. But if you add a lot of water instead of just an accidental smidge, your hot seized chocolate will immediately go runny again. (If only I knew this when I did that sachertorte!)

This brings us to the magical ingredient: potatoes! 

The spuds added enough water (or, in twenty-dollar terms, the spuds added enough moisture content) to unseize the chocolate and make it act melted again. Potatoes really can solve all our problems in life.

The last step was to add a lot of powdered sugar. I had to put aside the spoon and knead it like I was making meatloaf. At first we had a crumbly mess. I feared that I had wasted a lot of chocolate.

But after getting my hands in there and forcing everything to mix, we had, um, this.

At least it's holding itself together.

I know what we're all thinking, so let's watch the video.

I managed to press the fudge into our container, but I think quartering the recipe made this harder than it should have been. The fudge couldn't hold onto its small amount of retained heat long enough to shape it and make it look nice in the pan. But after we had gotten it as good as we ever would, I cut it into four very generous pieces. I don't like tiny rations of chocolate.

 

This wasn't the best fudge I ever made. But I think that's because I added all of the powdered sugar at once when the recipe says to add it "gradually." My single day of experience with this recipe tells me the word "gradually" in the recipe means to "stop according to taste" and not "mix in all of it." Since I realized that too late, my first-ever spud fudge was more or less like sliceable cake frosting.

However, I could tell this would be good if I didn't dump in an excess of sugar. And maybe I simply needed a lot of chocolate after paying for an entire car air conditioner's worth of parts-- even if I saved at least a thousand dollars by persuading some friends to, um, help install everything.

This time, I forestalled our seizing chocolate by melting it with nothing else. Doesn't this like a better start to fudge?

Next, I added the potato, butter, and vanilla to the melted chocolate together. This meant we added too much water (or, in order to preemptively one-up food pedants, we added too much moisture content) for the chocolate to seize. I know that our chocolate unseized and broke apart the first time, but it was nice to keep things just a bit easier. 

I also omitted about a third of the sugar, which I think made the fudge better. Really, I think you can leave out about half the sugar before you miss it.

A lot of "no-cook" recipes are sad imitations of their respective originals, but this was in fact fudge. It is a lot better than I thought it'd be. If I'm being honest, it's not quite as good as Fantasy Fudge, but it's definitely good enough to give away. And I really love how easy it is to reduce to very small amounts. And of course, we didn't heat the kitchen at all!