I find myself conflicted. I have spent too much time this past week ruminating on whether or not it really matter which variety of potato one uses, outside of the slightly reductive designation of waxy, floury, or a bit of both?
A look at the shelves at my local supermarkets reveals a dull homogeneity when it comes to the potato offering. In fact, more often than not, the simplest surface designation is all that is offered. Baking potatoes, jacket potatoes, baby potatoes, new potatoes, even simply white potatoes. Albert Bartlett seems to have cornered the market in the more interesting end of the mass market with their Rooster and Apache varieties, and if one is lucky, and the season is upon us, you might spot a variety of fingerling (aka the little long knobbly ones) such as Anya or Pink Fir, or you might be able to spot a Charlotte or a Jersey Royal.
Roast potato fetishists will know their Maris Piper from their King Edwards or their Yukon Gold, and they’ll likely be rewarded with a choice of one or two of them nicely labelled in the root vegetable aisle. Those with a farm shop or specialist fruit and veg monger within striking distance will no doubt have been lightened of a few gelders for the privilege of a Ratte or a Violetta or a Salad Blue once or twice a year, and there is a unique pleasure to be had in each, but unless you’re someone who simply steams your spud and eats it with nothing but a crunch of salt, is the difference worth it?
I have always maintained that I do not particularly like potatoes, yet what I really mean is that I don’t like roast potatoes or chips. At all. And that feels like a very revealing sentence to put into the public domain. The reason I mention it though is that both of these potato preparations largely rest on the primacy of technique more than they do on the specificity of potato. Good old J. Kenji Lopez-Alt has done a good deal of testing on the perfect roast potato and the main takeaway was about adding baking powder to the water to increase alkalinity, and boiling the potatoes in boiling water rather than cold in order to create fluffier outsides before the middles are parboiled (and thus getting a crispy outer crust and a perfect fluffy inside after a good hard roast.) He makes no mention of the hot fat needed to perfectly roast the parboiled potato, but we’ve all absorbed enough Jamie and Nigella to know that a good deal of hot duck, or goose, fat gives a premium crust and richer flavour, whilst a good neutral oil will do a very decent job for a fraction of the cost.
Anyone who followed the early 2000’s trend for perfect chips will have a similarly tedious checklist of tasks to do with brining, parboiling, freezing, first frying, second frying, thrice frying, etc. The point is that beyond the perfect technique, the variety of potato itself always gets second billing.
Potatoes are a seasonal beast. Seasonality and storage both can have an impact on the sugars and starches retained in the tuber and thus how they will respond in a pan of water, a roasting tray, a deep-fat fryer. Five Guys, for many people the fast-food chipping champions, have a rotational program of potatoes throughout the year in order to maintain consistency in the chips they serve. That’s correct, the raw ingredient has to change in order that the end result is consistent.
It is one of life's tedious truisms that a potato pulled from the ground, boiled and eaten fresh with butter is truly the best way to appreciate its flavour. Yet, this is not how 99% of us enjoy potatoes, and likely never will, so should we scratch that from the chalkboard of things that can, and should be said about potatoes. Linked to this, a perusal of a seed catalogue at home reveals 63 varieties of potato available for me to select and plant. There are about 500 varieties all told in Europe, and many more globally I am sure, and yet our offering in the shops is limited as outlined above. Perhaps though when it comes to potatoes it just matters less?
In the majority of countries, potato consumption is falling. I recall a period a few years ago when bus stops and train stations in the UK were plastered with advertising campaigns for potatoes, taken out by the potato growers association I presume, which seemed quaint and faintly humorous, but pointed, I guess, to a building panic about the demand for their wares. I presume that the ever-growing trend for a more global diet, the increase in eating out, the rising dominance of pasta and rice on the dinner table, the wellness and diet gurus who so evangelically draw largely unfair conclusions about potatoes and their lack of nutritional benefit, these have all contributed to the death by a thousand cuts the potato has received in the last decade or so.
A conversation on a recent trip to Ireland was illuminating when it came to the health benefits of the potato. Prior to the great hunger, the potato led diet of the Irish meant they were some of the healthiest people in the world. The tuber that we boil and eat holds a teeming plethora of nutrients and the skin that we so often peel and discard holds even more. To give this some context, one potato contains about 70% of our recommended daily intake of vitamin C and has more potassium than a banana. Thus, a diet rich in potatoes, especially if unpeeled and simply prepared, is a rather good thing, certainly far from the one-dimensional carbohydrate that people would have us believe.
We have, in recent history, lived through waves of interest (and slightly cynical upselling,) of heritage vegetables. Tomatoes, carrots, beetroot and various greens have all received the treatment. The development and adoption of the trend seems always to pass through a lineage of home growers and allotmentists, to farmers and farmers markets, restaurants and veg supplies, fruit and veg shops, and finally, and most cynically, supermarkets. By the time Adrian from work is telling you about his colourful radishes or candy-cane beetroots from Aldi, you know that anything heritage about the product has been lost and you’re simply benefitting from some savvy grower with a hot-house who has homogenised a once unique product.
So, what is the upshot of all of this? If you’re a roast potato obsessive with a cast-iron technique in the bank, crack on, you know what you’re doing already. If you’re drawn to dauphinoise, Janson’s temptation, Boulangere, au gratin, Hasselback, scalloped, mashed, Lyonnaise, rosti or latke, then again, the technique and the various adornments and seasoning are going to be doing much more work than the potato itself. Sure, you’ll want to select the correct designation of floury, waxy or the ones with a bit of both, but the combination of recipe and supermarket aisle will have all the information to guide you on that. Maybe it’s time we revisit the simple boiled potato as a side dish? And if we did, we’d likely focus again on the flavour of the potato itself, and maybe then we’d be beating down the doors of our supermarket buyers and clamouring for varieties that have all but fallen out of favour.
Regardless of this unlikely scenario, below is a round-up of the most commonly available varieties and a selection of dishes they would work well for. And then after that? Well, I’ve included some slightly unusual recipes that in my mind came from a woman who used to look after me sometimes when I was young. In truth, I know that I’ve made that connection up, but the recipes are fun, will hopefully extend your repertoire, and are somehow all the tastier for imagining them as coming from a Roald Dahl-esque battleaxe whose main weapon for defeating my building gluttony was to feed me until bursting with naughty potato creations. And with my earlier confession in mind, I think it might have worked.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to No Cartouche to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.