Saltwater potato storage?

Fellow permies! I need your wisdom/help/experience/suggestions/expertise 😁

We live in southern Chile, the birthplace of the potato. I plant at least 5 varieties each year, and we LOVE the clean yummy flavor of homegrown spuds. The problem, as usual with tubers, is storage--for now I store my unwashed cured potatoes in cardboard boxes with ample sawdust, but the potatoes still sprout after about 3 months. So I came up with a brilliant (?) idea today, what if I just threw whole potatoes into a bucket of saltwater? More specifically, I thought of throwing some seawater (we live on the oceanfront, so free supply!) into a food-grade plastic barrel and putting our unwashed, cured potatoes in there to store. I could leave the barrel in my barn, which during winter months is basically refrigerator temperature, so no risk of rapid fermentation. I wouldn't mind a little fermentation, since many native peoples have traditionally fermented potatoes in some way or another. The automatic salting would be awfully convenient as well.

I just would love to know if anyone else has done this? Or if there are other better low-input storage methods for potatoes? Of if anyone can shoot holes (theoretical or otherwise) in my "genius idea" 😊

I think it's going to turn into a disgusting slimy soup of rotten potato.  But say it doesn't and ferments in a good way, They are still going to go soft and then you are going to have a devil of a time getting the dirt off them, so I think they would have to be washed before going in.

I have fermented potatoes in salt water and then oven baked them, and they were very good. Long term I'm not so sure. Sounds like an old pickle barrel.
Freezing them takes up a lot of freezer space. . Mashing them and freezing would take up less space and there is a lot you can do with mashed potatoes. Canning them is a huge effort. Dehydrating might be an answer. Here is an article where they ferment and then freeze.
https://www.tipsbulletin.com/how-to-preserve-potatoes/

Skandi, you may very well be right about the sludgy mess, and upon further consideration it does seem like a good idea to wash if I did decide to brine them--I don't wash for dry storage, but that's obviously a different circumstance.

Robert, thanks for the article, I like the idea of fermenting and freezing! I definitely want to do that on a small scale for convenience meals, but for my whole potato crop would be a bit much. Another suggestion I saw was dehydrating potatoes for storage, which would definitely be an option for me since we just got our solar dehydrator set up!

It seems like the best plan is to just try my idea, maybe a couple of small buckets to experiment with first; one with seawater, another with a traditional salt brine with a stronger concentration of salt since that should slow fermentation. Maybe I'll make a new thread then and report on the results...

I predict they'll shrivel up pretty good. not sure if that's a problem for you or not, though.

Wondering if you tested this and what the results were?

Welcome to the forum, Erin!

I would love to find out about the results of this experiment too.

Hi Erin,

Welcome to Permies!