To Bake or Not to Bake

Dave, or more appropriately, Dave’s baking girls, er uh, his wife actually, came up with our header theme this week: To Bake or Not to Bake.

I must say it left me rather distraught for most of the days leading up to this week’s header. 

Though we love to bake and even bake nearly daily out of necessity, the likely hood of me having a display of baked goods from Bet or I to capture on digit and display on my header for you – highly unlikely! 

We’re rather lucky to be eating at all, no one has the energy to be creative or even follow instructions, and it’s highly unlikely that you’d even find clean cookware right about now.

I am forever hitting on the great idea of having a freezer rack full of three serving meals in tin foil pans (I know they’re not tin any more but I can’t spell that other metal) and a stack of paper plates put up just for these intense farmy days.  But I am forever hitting on the great idea three-quarters of the way through the particular season.  After I write this up, will someone please remind me to go put in on my computer calendar, you know the one I’m forever filling out and rarely looking at.  But I am trying..

Well any way, Monday I needed to check on our potatoes stored in the well house to see how they were getting along, take inventory, make storage-ability notes and possibly move them to a spot more conducive to chitting or greening since we’re less than a month from planting time. They are no longer a food commodity, instead they are now seed, well most of them anyway.

A Good Question, To Bake or Not

When I went out to do my survey, it donned on me.  My taters would make for a great header titled “To Bake or Not to Bake”.  Because unlike bread or cake, which you would always bake or it wouldn’t be bread or cake, you might not bake every potato you got your grubby little mitts on.

Let me introduce you to the Vicktory Farm and Garden’s Tater Brigade:  There are lots of ways to sort your taters but for today we’ve sorted them by cooking application; better for baking on the left, not so much on the right. Taste, flavor, goes without saying.

Sorting and Choosing for Cooking Quality

These are my choice of potatoes, well Dirt’s and mine, and therefore, super dry as dust, crumble in your sauce pan while steaming, potatoes are not on the counter here.  I don’t care for them.  As a baker they are almost too dry and often there is not enough sour cream in the refer for them. 

But my baker end (far left in the banner and above photo) is still very much a baker end.  They will make a lovely flaky baker, it’s just that they have other qualities as well.  For man did not live by giant super russeted baked potato alone.

In fact most of our tates are very versatile, maybe with the exception of the Atlantic, you can do just about anything to these fellas on the left.  And really you could as well to the ones on the right.  But I would be less inclined to bake them because they are so much better at other things, like tater salad, roasting, hanging around in a stew or soup.  Because they will do just that, hang in there and not fall to pieces.  So not all our potatoes are as all purpose as the ones in the middle.

What’s It All About Tatey?

(you should have sung that)

Potato texture is all about two things.  One of the two is the two different kinds of starches, one is straight, Amylose, and one is crooked (branched), Amylopectin.  And as one might suspect the starch whose name ends in “pectin” holds together like the finger jello you threw at your brother when you thought no one was looking. Only a high velocity pitch will shatter that puppy.

The other thing that has to do with texture and whether the tater you hold in you hand is better baked or home-fried (which is really sauteed with bacon grease – not fried like a long stick in deep fat, er, oil) is the solids content, low solids is a moist tater, and high solids is a dry as dust specimen.

Okay not really, but if you have a tater that is both straight starched and tips the scale at high solids you’ve got a great candidate for baking or deep frying or chipping, these also make great mashers if you like them dry and fluffy to begin with but then add a goodly amount of cream and butter, call Ore-Ida, you’ve just mastered what they replicate in a box. 

VF&G’s Far Left and Beyond

That brings us to the far left of my line up, and has nothing to do with political stance and far more to do with I read from left to right, the topic was “To Bake or Not to Bake” so therefore the bakers are on the far left.  If I were to think in political terms I probably would have flipped the line up, the ones over on the far right are far more progressive and not what one thinks of straight away when they think of potatoes.

When we think potatoes, be honest, we think of Baked, Mashed, and their little buddy, Fried (like a french fry or a chip).  The closest VF&G has for that is Atlantic.  Sold at all the local seed selling stores where you find “organic” seed potatoes and Burkenstock wearing clerks to sell them.  But funny thing is it is no more heirloom that my son-in-law.   Born roughly the same year, the same year I graduated from high school and I am just a spring chicken, okay fall hen, but you get the point.  Atlantic was developed for the potato industry in 1976 for; ease of harvest, long storage, and commercial consumption, baking, mashing, frying, chipping.  Hardly an heirloom.  But there you have the fickleness of the whole Hair-loom industry and the empty-headedness of Burkie wearers. 

So my far left is hardly far left, its more left of center or left of strictly all purpose.  Very useful to me as a baker, less slathering more chance for tater flavor to come through.  And then I can randomly sip at my Irish stout rather than chug it after every dry as dust bite. 

Middle of the Line

Which is to say, if like me you like the smashed garlic potatoes that some high end restaurants serve and I copy, you’ll want something a little more moist and firm but not waxy super firm.

You’ll want these fellas in the middle of the line up, they are great for that, well really the two on the far left as well, because quite frankly I like a potato not a bowl of potato flour – but that’s strictly a personal opinion and one I certainly wouldn’t argue with if you said the opposite. So like I said at the top of all this yammerin’ ’bout tates, you won’t find one at the top of the mealy dry scale here.  Well not yet anyway.  So to some folks even my far right bakers and mashers pictured here are more closely related to the all purpose category and certainly by the third from the left we have entered middle of the road. 

Ahh, the versatile potato, the individual versatile potato.  A potato that when you get to your pantry and your out of your ultimate baker you could substitute these fellas or if you’re out of your mom’s waxy salad potato these will substitute as well.  They will be good in just about anything you apply them to, nearly a Jack of All Trades – Master of None sort of fellow.  Except that there are some culinary applications that they excel at that the ones on the far left or far right certainly do not, personal Lanny opinions aside even.

If you really like your baked and mashed potatoes like the industry thinks you do, and you like that waxy finger jello-esque salad tater and you think you won’t be in need of an all purpose potato, then make sure you never desire a creamy potato soup.  Or a lovely Irish seafood stew, such as my good friend Rebecca at SuburbanHedgeRow makes. 

She went to her pantry, and found that she only had enough of Yukon Golds to make her stew, not the taters she usually uses and she figured that it would be okay.  And while not a mealy dry, they are a dry non-the-less, a firm dry.  Well her stew was just fine and it kept her family from starving that night but it wasn’t her usual creamy stew, even though I’m sure that she used cream.  The potato that she used because of pantry allotments left her stew feeling a bit grainy and less creamy than it should. Not like a middle of the road potato would have served up.

Now there are the soup applications where you want the chunk of tater to stay exactly as you cut it.  Much like how some folks like their tater salad. For that, your Irish Beef Stew perhaps, you want a truly wet waxy fellow.   But there are the vichyssoises and the Irish seafood stews, and the clam chowders even, that either will be pureed and need to be creamy not grainy, or as in my world of clam chowder,  a soup thickened by the starch of the potato but with remaining chunks and creamy to boot.  That is only delivered by one potato, a straight starched but middle of the road solids type of tater. 

So maybe those fellas that stand somewhere in the middle of dry as bones and wet as a dishrag field of potatoes shouldn’t be titled All Purpose as much as More Purposed Potatoes.  Even the ones that most folks might not label as All Purpose because it lacks the waxiness, firmness, to be a good salad tater, ahh but that is only if you like your potato salad dressing on, not in, your potato salad.

Now I’m not talkin the mush that comes from using a true baker and calling it “Baked Potato Salad” and using sour cream rather than Best Foods mayonnaise.  But instead a potato that is just a right mix and will slough just enough and be open just enough for some of the dressing to penetrate into the individual cube of tater, but yet hang in there and still look like potato salad and not a cold left-over, all-ready-dressed baked potato.

This all boils down to why I, as the chief cook and bottle washer (I said chief, not only, simmer down girls, and Dirt), and potato selector, I tend to choose what most would call All Purpose, not because I just want it one button easy.  But because the qualities in the so called “All Purpose potato” are really the qualities I as a cook and consumer are looking for.  The intricacies of taste and minutia of texture comes into play and that is why we don’t grow just one good AP potato either.

The Far Right

So I doubt that you’d find one that is all together at the other end  of the spectrum from the perfect baker, the one that is the quintessentially perfect salad or Minestrone soup potato.  Though Red Thumb there on the far right is pretty doggone waxy and moist.  (waxy remember is what the pectin gets ya).  Waxy is what mom, er, grandmom, made her tater salad out of.  Back in the day, in the grocery store, waxy potatoes are what the produce man called “White Potatoes”.  And in recent years the “Red Potato” has joined that illustrious company.  But when we start exploring the world of potatoes we soon come to realize that color isn’t the determining factor in texture, nor is shape.  It kills me to see a bag of mixed fingerlings, as if they all cook up the same because they are “fingerlings”.  Ahh yes, some more Burkenstock ignorance at play once again. 

Red Thumb is a fingerling and one that I would put square in the waxy wet category. Swedish Peanut (not one we currently grow) is its exact opposite, way over in the flaky mealy dry category yet it is also a fingerling.

You’ve got to find your potatoes place in the world not just by looking him or her square in the eyes but you’ve got to cut him open, cook him and her up and see what they do.  You can, to some degree, trust the catalogs and what they say your potato will do, but beware, they are after all selling seed potatoes.  They will have a tendency to make it sound like your potato can do it all in the kitchen and potty train your reluctant toddler all at the same time.  Catalog writers suffer from, are hired for, their disease of hyperbole.  Dirt would have been a great catalog writer, if only he cared.

Oh you poor Dear and Clever Reader, I’ve once again talked your ear off (or your eyes out) and I’ve only scratched the surface of the culinary slice and dice of the potato world.  I was going to begin to assail your mind with the intricacies of choosing taters for roasting, but I will give you a break and forego the talk for another time.