Dialyzing your potatoes

[MooseMom]

Seriously, does anyone do this?  Really?  What is the point of completely robbing a food of any nutritional value only to be able to eat an unrecognizable version of it?  It just seems to be so much more bother than it's worth.  I eat rice instead.

[Rerun]

I do it.  If you are a potato person and miss it you will do it just to get the taste and the other goodies you can put on top of it like butter and sour cream and chives and green onions, and and.....

I cube them and put them in a big pan of water and let them leach over nignt maybe changing the water once.  Then I can cook them and have a nice side dish.

It is calories if nothing else.

YUM!

[MooseMom]

   Such a potato addict you are...going through all of that just to get your fix.  After the cubing and the leaching, does it still really taste like a potato?  I guess you have to take the skin off, right?  Of course, that's the best part, the skin.

[jbeany]

Actually, I always thought they tasted fine.  I usually mashed mine, though, and by the time you get done seasoning them, you can't tell the difference.

[YLGuy]

I do once and awhile.  The kids love it because they know I will fry up the leftovers the next morning with breakfast.

[woodsman]

I do this all the time and they taste greatm fried, mashed, hashbrowns. I love taters and if soaking them is what needs to be done then so be it.

[Restorer]

I might do it if I really crave potatoes, or if a recipe really really needs it, but usually I just eat a small amount of potato. A couple nights ago, I had half of the smallest baked potato. I miss them, but I figure, I went for a year and a half without them before I was on dialysis, I can do the same now that I'm on hemo.

[glitter]

I did it all the time for my husband, he was a meat and potatoes man. Leeching them does not remove the taste at all, and some people don't like rice. I also thought a cup of rice had more liquid then an equal amount of fried, leeched potatoes.

[Restorer]

I can't find values for simply "fried" potatoes (and I don't know what you mean exactly by that), but I did find values for frozen, then baked, steak fries, which I guess are a good compromise.

100 g of cooked rice: 130 calories and 68.4 g water.
100 g of cooked
100 g of steak fries: 152 calories and 64.9 g of water.
100 g of baked potato, without skin: 93 calories and 75.4 g of water

I suspect home-cooked potatoes, especially if they're not deep-fried, would have much more water than the steak fries. Leeching could only increase that even more.

We soaked out potatoes for mashed potatoes one Thanksgiving. They ended up undersalted, but even besides that, they were missing a distinct... potatoey flavor and taste.

[MooseMom]

Well, maybe I'll try it, then.  How about parsnips?  Anyone eat or dialyze parsnips?  I adore them, but being a root vegetable, I suspect they're high in K, too.

[Jean]

I do it all the time. I dont notice any difference in the tast, however, while cutting them first I have noticed a tremendous amount of, I think starch, on my knife and on my board. More often then not tho, I use the loaded baked instant mashed potstoes and they are really really good. But, we also eat rice and sometimes I just forgo all of it and make DH those frozen hash browns. He loves them, and all you do is put them in the oven.

[AguynamedKim]

I've purchased several books about CKD as well as recipe books.  I love to cook - I would definitely call it a hobby.  One of the books I got was called "More Bio-fuel-Less Bio-waste."  It basically discusses was of "dialyzing" your food, including proteins.  After reading about soaking the meat, then rinsing, then briefly cooking at a low tempurature, then rinsing it again, I basically decided that being vegetarian was the way I was going to go.   

That said, the reduction of Creatine, Potassium, Phosphorous, and Sodium was quite impressive.  For 100 grams (about 3 1/2 ounces) of hamburger meat, it went from 216 mg of Potassium to 36 mg, 123 mg of Phosphorous to 70 mg, and 44 mg of Sodium to 9 mg.  A reduction of 83% Potassium, 43% Phosphorous, and 80% Sodium.  The book does talk about reducing Creatine as well and states that 10-30% of creatinine in the body is influenced by this.  I thought I had read that creatinine is used as a marker for CKD mostly because diet did not influence this number.  Of course, thinking about this, as I eat low protein, I'm hoping the number doesn't go up, but I do not really expect it to go down.  When I purchased the supplements from Calwoods Nutritionals (Essential Amino Acid supplements), they said that they often see about a .5 drop in the blood serum creatinine level.  This is starting to jive a little bit because as Sunny said in this thread http://ihatedialysis.com/forum/index.php?topic=20123.0 you may end up with a better GFR reading, but you might feel like someone with a lower GFR rating because while you may have slowed down the disease, you may also be "juking" the numbers a little bit to an slightly artifically better GFR (as calculated from creatinine).

[MooseMom]

Being the open minded person that I am ( ), I dialyzed some potatoes for the first time.  I used DaVita's recipe for garlic mashed potatoes, and even though from beginning to end it took EIGHT HOURS, I have to say they were quite yumtastic.  My husband snarfed them down, so I didn't get the chance to eat too much!