I have been having a hard time finding tater tots at the store. When I do find them, they are very expensive and the last bag I purchased simply crumbled into little bits whenever we cooked them. However, I did find some bags of potatoes on a really good deal–20c/lb–and bought about 30 pounds. I have a couple of projects I wanted to do. One was making tater tots. I had done it one time before and we liked them, so it was time to try again.

I combined several recipes I found on the internet. I wanted plain ones, not including cheese or onions or many spices.

I parboiled peeled, whole potatoes–10-15 pounds–not sure because I used several partial bags, plus one full 5-lb one. Mine stayed in the hot water a little too long–about 8-10 plus minutes because I got distracted. I believe 4-6 minutes for small potatoes and 6-7 minutes for really big ones would be about right.

After cooling them enough to handle, I grated them and put them into a bowl. Sadly, some were so cooked it was more like pushing mashed potatoes through the grater–oops! I filled 2 of the largest Pyrex bowls I have with shreds. The following recipe is for one large bowl, which was about 5-7 pounds of shreds. Mix:

One large Pyrex bowl of parboiled potato shreds

1 Tablespoon Cornstarch

1 Tablespoon 1-1 Bob’s Red Mill Gluten Free Flour

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon pepper

1/8-1/4 teaspoon cayenne powder (to taste–mine are not hot at all

I formed them into little logs with my hands and fried them in a little bit of canola oil until they were brown. Because I parboiled my potatoes too long, I confess some of mine are more like fried mashed potatoes. They still taste good, if I have to go with how many disappeared while I was frying them off. There were 5 of us here nipping on them, and yum! is all I have to say.

The only other time I made them, I didn’t cook my potatoes too long and there were distinct hash-brown like shreds in them, which finished cooking as they were pre-fried and also baked afterwards for serving. I will do that again next time.

I cooled them on paper towels and put them on a waxed-paper covered cookie sheet. That pan went into the freezer to flash freeze and I will transfer them to baggies once they cool. When I made these before, I simply warmed them up in the air fryer or oven when we wanted to eat them, just like I would do with the frozen ones from the store.

I’m excited to have tater tots in the freezer again. There were so many possibilities I saw on the internet, including adding cheddar cheese, onion powder, green onions or chives and more. There were also lots of different combinations of flours to use as binders, such as potato starch, regular wheat flour (for those it doesn’t bother), and other flours. I concluded that the main things were potatoes, salt, pepper and a little flour of some sort to bind it together. It did take quite a bit of time to form and pre-fry all these. I ended up with that huge pan full, plates and plates that people snacked on or ate for dinner, and a few extras that didn’t fit on the tray.