Potatoes!

Early this summer, my friend Ellen (who writes a fascinating Spokane-based food blog, Ethical Eating), gave me four seed potatoes for my garden.  They didn't look like much.  In fact, they looked like garbage.  They were sprouted (which I suppose is a good thing in a seed potato) and very soft.  I can't say I had much hope for them, especially as I've never planted potatoes before.  Still, I plopped them in the ground, whole, and didn't touch them until last week.  I declare they were some of the easiest and most satisfying vegetables I've planted.  Within a couple of weeks they sent up thick, vigorous sprouts.  A few weeks after that, they flowered surprisingly pretty purple and white flowers.  Last week, I dug up all of my potato plants, and my four squishy bits of garbage turned into a bonanza of food.  I had thought that Ellen had only given me two varieties, so I was surprised to discover I had three:  a deep purple, a small white, and what looked like a red skinned potato.  The red skinned were the most prolific, giving me both the largest potatoes and the most potatoes per plant.    

I have something of a romantic attachment to potatoes.  During one of our first evenings together, Jeremy told me all about the summer he worked for a plant breeding project in the Entomology department at Cornell.  They were trying to breed a species of potato that was naturally resistant to the dreaded potato beetle without requiring being doused with pesticides.  The project lasted for years, and was a complete success, but for one small hitch.  They developed a plant whose leaves had a lot of little hairs which, when chewed, released polyphenol oxidase.  Polyphenol oxidase acted like an epoxy on the mouths of the poor hungry potato beetles, thus rendering them harmless to the plants.  It doesn't even kill the beetles.  They just spend so much time trying to cleaning themselves that they couldn't create successful potato beetle families.  Thus, there was no time for the insects even to develop resistance to the plants.   Jeremy's job was to count and sex the potato beetles used in the experiment.  I knew I was falling hard for him when two hours of stories about sexing potato beetles had kept me as riveted as any nature documentary.

The hitch, you ask?  Polyphenol oxidase turns black when you deep fry it.  They created a potato that could be grown without pesticides, but no one would buy it because you couldn't turn it into chips or fries.  

Turns out that potatoes are surprisingly interesting plants.  They are members of the deadly nightshade family, and cousins of the tomato.  Like the tomato, they were a New World crop introduced to Europe in the sixteenth century.  Just think of Italian food with no gnocchi or tomato sauce!  The part we eat is neither fruit nor root, but technically part of the stem.  There are literally thousands of different species of potatoes.  In the mountains of South America, where they were first cultivated, the farmers used a different variety for each micro-climate:  each change in elevation, each exposure on a slope, each new longitude had its own type of potato.  Just think how different that is from modern agriculture, where we develop one crop and them bulldoze, irrigate, and douse the land in pesticide until we can grow that one crop, even though that process destroys the land for long term productivity and invites the myriad problems associated with a monoculture.  This episode of Diary of a Foodie has a fascinating vignette about a Chilean woman trying to save ancient varieties of potatoes.  She finds most of her new types in cemeteries, since traditionally her people were buried with food for their next life.

The problem with my beautiful potatoes is that I had no idea how to cook them.  Different types of potatoes lend themselves to different applications.  Russets bake well, and Yukon Golds make the best mashed potatoes, (and almost everything else.  Almost every new issue of Cook's Illustrated has some potato recipe that begins with them testing all sorts of potatoes, and I think they have all ended up using Yukon Golds.)  Fingerlings are amazing roasted.  Since I was pretty sure my white potatoes were fingerlings, and because I thought that most potatoes respond well to roasting, I decided to roast some of my treasure trove.  I used my usual technique:  I cut them into large chunks and par-boiled them until about half cooked.  Then I drained them, cut them into smaller chunks, and tossed with a good deal of olive oil and salt.  Cook's Illustrated has a great tip for oven-roasting potatoes this way:  they suggest that stirring them roughly with a fork, so that the surface breaks up a little bit, leads to increased crispness.  It usually does, too.  Then, onto a cookie sheet in a hot oven for about thirty minutes, stirring occasionally, until brown and yummy.

I have used this technique countless times, with Yukon Golds, fingerlings, thin-skinned new potatoes, and it always works great.  Until this time.  They just never got crispy.  They got a little hard on the outside from all the heat and all the trying to crisp them.  They were okay, but nothing special.  Also, the browning process masked the pretty colors, so you couldn't really tell the beautiful purple potatoes were purple and not just black.  Sad.

Fortunately, I had a good number of the red potatoes left, and they were in fact far from your run of the mill red-skinned, white fleshed fellows.  Their flesh was a beautiful pink color, slightly mottled like pink marble.  So, the other night, I made pink mashed potatoes.  The color was beautiful, and they had a lovely, earthy, potato-y flavor that was definitely more pronounced than your store bought varieties have.

I love my mashed potatoes.  They aren't healthy, and I don't follow the rules, but they are rich and creamy and luscious.  I think they are a little closer to french-style mashed potatoes than what you normally find next to American meatloaf.  I begin, of course, by boiling them.  When they are very soft, I drain them extra carefully, and put them in the bowl of my KitchenAid with a good deal of butter (at least half a stick).  I use the paddle to break up the potatoes and incorporate the butter.  I know you aren't supposed to use a machine to mash potatoes.  I know the conventional wisdom says that this leads to gummy potatoes.  I don't know what to say, except that I have never, ever ended up with gummy potatoes this way.  Regardless of what method you use to mash your potatoes, I do think mixing the butter in first, before the dairy and while the potatoes are still hot, helps the final product.

Once the butter is melted and the potatoes are basically mashed, I add either half and half or cream (or milk if it is all I have) until they are basically mashed potato consistency.  Then, the secret ingredient:  a big dollop of sour cream.  It ups the creaminess without making the potatoes runny, and it gives the flavor just a little tang.  Then, lots of salt, some pepper, and often some garlic powder.  I promise, these are good enough that you don't need gravy.  I even sometimes make a meal out of them by adding chunks of other stuff:  sauteed mushrooms, bacon, different cheeses, shrimp.  Whatever you have that you think goes well together and well with creaminess.  The chef at the Heathman Restaurant in Portland back in the 90's had a whole series of mashed potato with stuff dishes that were all pretty phenomenal, and I stole the idea from him.

I saved a few of my pink beauties, hoping that they will turn all soft and sprout so that I can plant them again next year.  If you have any interesting potato varieties, perhaps we could organize a potato swap?