Potato starch probably doesn’t factor into your life very much, and that’s a good thing. Because if you know about the baking potential of potato starch, it’s because you’re riddled with allergies like me.

My name is Patricia Johns, and I’m riddled with allergies. Gluten, dairy and soy, to be precise. All the good stuff.

So in an attempt to start my own gluten-free baking (which won’t exactly save me money, but will at least make some edible bread possible), I realized that I needed to procure potato starch.

Now, this is not the place to learn how to make potato starch. You can learn here or here. But in researching how to make it, I realized that potato starch is some precious substance. It’s like getting the milk of a lactating mouse. It takes a lot of potatoes and a lot of patience to get a very small amount of starch.

This is the starch taken from four fairly large potatoes. (You’re looking for the whitish substance on the bottom of the plate. And that’s a salad plate.)

So this week while not writing, this is what I’m doing–making potato starch. I feel strangely victorious after having milked a potato. 😉