You say potato, I say Red Rascal: chefs seek out variety in spuds

Chefs from Australia’s best restaurants seek out unusual, hand-picked potatoes for a multitude of dishes.

Dobson's Potatoes

Goulburn Valley farmer Geoff Dobson has always known a ­potato is much more than just a mere spud.

He has never thought that all potatoes are the same; a bulk commodity to be carelessly bought, roughly treated and fit only to be turned into greasy chips or tasteless white mash.

Potatoes, their quality and their many different varieties are a life’s work for 79-year-old Dobson and his wife Bronwyn, who have played a key role in the rebirth of the potato as part of modern Australian cooking since they first started growing unusual potato varieties 30 years ago on their riverside Acheron farm.

Now 12 less-common varieties flourish in their rich soils. Hand harvesting of new-season potatoes with colourful names and often with creamy, yellow, pink and purple-hued flesh to match, is under way on the Dobsons’ award-winning farm.

In a world where most consumers struggle to remember or even notice the type of potato they bought at Coles or Woolworths last week, luscious labels such as Jersey Royal, Pink Fir Apple, Purple Congos, Kipflers, Dutch Cream, Toolangi Delight, Patrones, King Edward, Red Rascals and his new Pentland Dell tumble off Dobson’s tongue.

But times are changing fast, with the Dobsons in the vanguard, as chefs from Australia’s best restaurants seek out unusual, hand-picked and high-quality potatoes to use in a multitude of dishes.

At Peruvian restaurant Pastuso in Melbourne’s Flinders Lane, the classic causa is prepared using a low-starch yellow Peruvian potato known as Papa Amarilla.

“Consumers are getting to know a few names and [to understand] that different varieties have different uses,” Dobson said from his farm, as he lovingly unearthed new potatoes hidden deep in the soil. “That’s a big change from the 80s when everything sold in the shops was just a potato and often of rubbish quality.

“Not many restaurants are adventurous enough to try the fancy ones — all they seem to want is anything that fries well; but I’m seeing that Purple Congos, once just a novelty, are becoming very trendy with foodies at the moment.”

At Melbourne’s Prahran market, the “Potato Man”, Matthew Mow, is seeing the same trends.

His store sells only specialist gourmet potatoes, mushrooms, wasabi and garlic — all grown free from chemical sprays — with Mow thrilled that after 40 years customers are now asking for different potato varieties to use in different ways.

Mow says Tasmanian-grown Marist Pipers are on trend, after global chef Heston Blumenthal recommended them as ideal for frying and roasting in duck fat.

Dobson’s Purple Congos make spectacular purple-tinted mash and purple-and-white gnocchi, says Mow, while the Pink Fir Apple from England has a slight apple flavour that marries perfectly alongside roast pork.

“If a customer says to me a spud is just a spud, I give them a Purple Congo to take home and try — it opens their mind to the different flavours and textures that are available and makes people realise that what is sold in the supermarkets is not the best example of a ­potato.”

In contrast to a decade ago, ­potatoes are also rapidly finding favour as a health food, with ­customers willing to pay double normal prices ($4-$6 a kilogram) for varieties that deliver added health benefits. Purple, pink, yellow and red potatoes contain higher levels of beneficial minerals, vitamins, flavoids and antioxidant compounds such as anthocyanin, known to reduce the risk of heart disease, bowel cancer and memory loss. Recent “Potato Tracker” surveys by marketing firm Colmar Brunton confirm Australian consumers are becoming both more potato-literate and more aware of the humble spud’s health ­attributes.

Desirees, Dutch Cream and Kipfler varieties are the most well-known, with pink-eyed Kestrels and red-skinned Red Rascals nominated as rising star performers.

The surveys, commissioned by potato and vegetable grower body Ausveg, also showed the proportion of consumers who believe potatoes are fattening has reduced markedly in the past 10 years,

The biggest myth being smashed as interest in potatoes grows is that all potatoes are the same.

Since it was first domesticated 8000 years ago from a few wild potato vines growing high in the dry Atlas Mountains near Lake Titicaca (modern-day Peru), the ubiquitous potato has become a central part of the diet for billions of people daily.

There are now more than 4500 types of potato worldwide, based on the original 2800 native varieties stored for posterity and future breeding use at the International Potato Centre (CIP) in Peru’s capital Lima, and backed up for safekeeping in the “Doomsday Vault” on the Arctic island of Svalbard (along with most of the world’s known crop seeds).

Gabriela Burgos of the CIP potato screening program says any single potato simply boiled holds more protein, vitamin C, vitamin B, calcium, iron, potassium and zinc, and antioxidants than almost any other vegetable.

Potatoes also have no cholesterol and are very low in fat, contrary to the perception that spuds are a lump of starch that will make you fat. Instead, potatoes have just 5 per cent the fat content of wheat, contain one quarter the calories of bread, and are less fattening than rice or pasta.

Potatoes can be grown with much less water and in poorer soils than virtually any other crop, produce food in just 80 days from planting, and in such volume that the food value of a hectare of potatoes is more than double that of wheat.

It is also one of the rare foods that can sustain human life, although not ideally in a balanced diet, entirely on its own.

“The potato is almost the perfect food and the potato plant almost the perfect crop,’’ says Burgos.

The US National Aeronautical and Space Administration now recognises the potato as the best all-round package of nutritious food known to man. Central to its well-advanced plans for astronauts to travel to Mars and establish a human bubble colony there, are systems that will enable fresh potatoes to be grown outside in Mars’s 90 per cent carbon dioxide atmosphere and poor soil.

A Mars-farming trial is already under way in Peru, in a glasshouse on desert soils almost identical to the Red Planet, growing a specially selected variety of potato that can tolerate high CO2 levels and little water. The trial is high stakes. If potatoes can’t be successfully grown, interplanetary travel is out and Mars will never be colonised.

Burgos, who is screening more than 1000 varieties of potato to discover the unique food benefits, growing conditions and special health attributes of each, believes there is a potato variety to suit almost every agricultural niche and medicinal requirement.

Her theory is that besides being suited to different altitudes, rainfall and soil types, each potato variety can solve a specific nutritional problem or health deficiency. She has already found that yellow-flesh potato generally have more available iron than purple or red-flesh varieties. As well, they have higher betacarotene content, important for eye health and in preventing macular degeneration. But purple-flesh varieties are highest in antioxidants, with one specific purple variety having an unusually high content of folic acid, the key to preventing spina bifida in unborn babies.

Traditional native varieties of potatoes grown in the Peruvian highlands, particularly pigmented ones, also have higher levels of trace elements and micro nutrients than the big white varieties most commonly grown in ­Australia.

“We are not looking for one perfect variety to suit the whole world, but for biodiversity,’’ Burgos says.

“It is possible in the future, especially in the developed world, that people will select and buy their variety of potato according to its natural health benefits, depending if they are a pregnant woman, an older person, or looking to correct an iron, zinc or vitamin C deficiency.’’

Burgos says CIP research is also revealing the best way to cook potatoes. While it is better to put green and orange vegetables in the microwave to preserve their vitamin and mineral content, Burgos was surprised to find nutrients in potatoes were best retained after light boiling, not microwaving.

“But the skin must be left on when boiling; it’s the peel that seems to protect the potatoes’ contents,’’ she says.

“Leave the peel on and you will keep 80 per cent of the nutrient benefits.’’

Back in the beautiful Acheron valley, Geoff Dobson is a disciple of the “keep it simple” principle when it comes to eating potatoes.

“First, make sure they are not damaged, green or old,” says Dobson, who hand-digs and hand-grades all his potatoes.

“Growers shouldn’t sell them like that and more shoppers should send them back.

“Then, when it comes to eating, it all comes back to butter and salt; dig an early season, very young and very new Jersey Royal, cooked with a bit of salt ’n butter, and it’s out of this world.”