Potatoes
In
the winter we have to use main crop potatoes if we want to avoid the
food miles involved in air freighting baby “new” potatoes - and potatoes
are heavy. However there are so many thousands of different potato
varieties that we can find one to suit our purpose at any season of the
year without transporting them more than a few yards, if we grow our
own, or a few miles if we buy local.
Potatoes have been cultivated in South America for more than 8,000 years
and are now an important staple crop for millions of people around the
world, providing not just carbohydrate but valuable amounts of Vitamin
C. Many of us eat potatoes in some form nearly every day.
Because they are so ubiquitous we tend to take them for granted and
though we boil, bake, roast and chip them we often ignore their flavour
and how we can combine this with other ingredients to create something
special.
Potato varieties vary in flavour, from the strong earthiness of Golden
Wonder or Kerr’s Pink to the butteriness of Nicola or Charlotte and the
mild, almost undetectable flavour of Cara. They also vary with growing
conditions: huge amounts of irrigation will dilute the flavour but don’t
be tempted to starve your tatties of water, a drought stricken potato is
a dead potato.
The cooking quality of potatoes is measured by their dry matter content
which is the non-water content of the potato, mostly starch. Starch
absorbs water and swells as it is cooked so boiling potatoes that don’t
disintegrate and become soup tend to have low dry matter. For frying and
roasting you want potatoes that don’t absorb too much fat and will crisp
up well, these have a high dry matter content.
For good mash avoid the salad type potatoes which go gluey and also
those whose outer parts dissolve in the boiling water while the middle
is still hard (Edzell Blue is particularly challenging to boil and is
best steamed). Good mashers are Valor, Wilja, Cara, Kestrel and Dunbar
Standard.
To store potatoes for more than a few weeks you need to keep them cool,
ideally at 4℃ but definitely above freezing. If they have been kept cold
and are then put in a warm place they will think that winter is over,
spring has arrived and it is time to put out shoots. While these stubby
little shoots are still small, no more than 1cm, they can be broken off
and the potato used, but once they grow longer some of the starch in the
potato will be converted to sugar and the potato will taste sweet as
well as becoming wrinkled as the shoots use the stored water.
Winter potato recipes