Low carb potatoes

I thought you might be interested in this - I was going through my kitchen 'gadgets' and wondering whether to junk the juicer attachment for my Kenwood Chef since I'm not drinking juices any more. Then I remembered a recipe that has been at the back of my mind to try, from the recipe book that came with it. It is kind of 'juicing in reverse' since it juices potatoes, throws away the juice and then uses the pulp remaining to make potato pancakes. I tried it, thinking that maybe the juice would contain the bulk of the starch, and lo and behold it seems to work. The juice settles down to about a centimetre layer of fine floury starch with a rapidly blackening starchy liquid above it, and I ate pancakes made from the pulp of two biggish potatoes mixed with an egg alongside a slice of bacon over an hour ago and my 1hr bg was only 6.7. I'll test again in another hour. They were nice too - not quite hash-browns, but definitely potato flavour, which I do miss.

In the days when I was juicing, I often used the pulp from apple or carrot juice to make muffins - I'm thinking I could do that now, give the juice to my kids and make muffins with almond flour or low-carb bake-mix. I'm also thinking I might try mixing the pulp with mashed cauliflour for a more 'potatoey' mash.

OK, post 2 hr check I'm down to 6.0 - I slightly messed up because I had a package arrive which included some low-carb shakes and drank one without thinking, but I don't think that could have reduced my levels, could it? I suppose it might have buffered them so I'll check again at 3 hrs as you suggested in case I get a late surge of some sort. But I definitely don't feel like I usually would if I had eaten a baked potato or whatever.

The sludge at the bottom of the discarded juice is definitely a starchy, floury substance - must be at least 4 tablespoons or so, I would think. So that must make a difference.

Before we all go wild with excitement, I should point out a couple of things.

A) I'm not formally diagnosed - I discovered that my levels shot up when I ate carbs when my husband was diagnosed as 'pre-diabetic' and have been self-testing and low carbing ever since. So your mileage may vary - but I certainly couldn't normally eat potato without BG going up to 8.5 or so.

B) I don't see the pulp working for anything much like a chip - it is kind of sticky/sludgey. Which fits with it being mostly the starch that has gone. (Though it might be interesting to deep-fry little blobs of it). And similarly it probably wouldn't work too well on its own for mash because it is the starchy element that makes it fluffy - that's why new potatoes don't work well for mash. But waffles, potato cakes - yes, I would think so, and I don't see how a cauli-potato pulp combo could fail to work pretty well.

Anyone else out there with a juicer lying idle? We could do with some comparative results. Just take care in case your reaction is different to mine.

I just looked up the actual recipe - it is called 'light potato rosti' and includes the sentence 'collect the juice in a jug but discard it as it is amazingly heavy in starch'. They just add a little olive oil and lemon juice then season and fry it. I added an egg to mine.

My post 3hr reading is down to 5.6, so it looks like it was OK for me. I ate 4 of them - two would have been OK with the bacon but there was enough for 4 so I ate the other two with butter - very yummy. So it wasn't a tiny portion.

Definitely something I'm going to do some more experimenting with.

Cugila, I understand that - that was why I posted my status to remind people. The last thing I want is for someone to eat something bad for them because of me. However, my reaction to carbohydrates is normally as bad or worse than that of my husband, who has been told he is 'pre-diabetic' or possibly early type two. I've never been to the doctor to be diagnosed - I can't see the point as they would only give me the same useless 'eat carbs' advice they have given my husband. I know from self testing and getting an HbA1C done privately that so long as I keep my diet low carb, my numbers stay in the normal zone, and if I don't, they don't. I think I'm what happens if someone who is at least 'pre-diabetic' by the normal diagnostic standard stays low-carb. I don't process carbs well, but I don't eat them, so I don't have a problem and hopefully will not progress further down the slope.

I have been extremely fortunate that I have been following a low carb diet since 2003 - my husband wanted to try it for weight loss and I took it up to keep him company and save cooking twice and not only did I lose weight but a whole host of little health niggles, high BP and a major tiredness problem dropped away. So I stuck to it even when he got bored of not drinking beer and put all his weight back on<g>. However, the six months before he was diagnosed, I had started eating 'good' carbs again - big mistake, as I found out when I tested myself after a brown rice dish just to prove to my DH that the finger pricker didn't hurt!

Hanadr, I'm not sure that would get so much of the starch out - the juicer grates very finely and spinns the juice out centifugally.

I agree that grating & squeezing would go some way towards the goal, but if you think in terms of trying to get apple juice out of an apple, you can see it will be a lot less efficient. If you grated an apple and squeezed it, how much juice would you expect to get versus putting it through a centifugal juicer? The grating size for normal Rosti is fairly big, too, which will leave a lot of the cell walls unbroken. The teeth on a juicer are designed to completely pulp the vegetable or fruit for maximum extraction. For instance, the pulp left from apple juice hardly tastes sweet at all.

Obviously we have two sets of variables here - the efficiency with which we can remove the starch from the potato pulp and the amount of carbs different people can cope with. Grating/squeezing may be enough to let some people include it in their diet - on the other hand, some people might not be able to cope even if a juicer was used.

I'm leaving the starchy residue extracted from my two potatoes to dry so that I can estimate the starch content, and my plan is to buy some more potatoes and try it again.

Juicers are the sort of thing people buy and use for 2 weeks - it might be worth asking your friends if they have one in the loft you can borrow.

Just had a bit of a food blip - we ordered a take-away Chinese as a treat for my daughter who had an important exam today, but when we got it the dish she had asked for was much too hot (in the chilli sense) for her to eat. So as it was supposed to be her treat I swapped my nice low-carb duck for a high sugar hi starch highly fluorescent orange chilli chicken and wasn't strong willed enough not to eat it. I only ate a few spoonfuls of it, though.

After one hour 9.8 - so clearly the lower readings I got with the juiced potato are significantly different.

Go Sid!!<g>