Potatoes

Who doesn’t love potatoes? One of the best comments I hear during CSA pickups is, usually from first time CSA members, they say, I didn’t know that potatoes could taste so good, and they all taste so different! They are right. Fresh potatoes properly grown and properly stored taste so good. They are so much tastier than anything you will ever get in a super market.

Wyatt works really hard trialing and sourcing different varieties, not only for taste and texture, but also for yield and growing compatibility for our environment. This year the potato crops did really well. Our storage refrigerators are bulging with lots of big beautiful delicious varieties.

This year we grew 10 different varieties.

Mountain Rose
French Fingerling
Ama Rosa
Red Gold
Yukon Gold
Harvest Moon
Purple Viking
Masquerade
Purple Majesty
Golden Globe

To help determine which potatoes to use for different recipes/uses potatoes are categorized into three general groups; starchy, waxy, and all-purpose.

In general all the potatoes we grow can be used for any use and most are categorized as ‘all purpose potatoes’. They will all be delicious boiled, fried, mashed or grilled.

That said I do have my favorites. For general use, especially roasting I love Purple Viking, Red Gold and Masquerade. I love Fingerling for boiling or steaming and nothing beats Yukon Gold for mashing and frying.

Here is a cross-section photo of a few of the potatoes we are growing this year. So pretty. I wish I had an all purple variety for the photo, but I didn’t. Kids love purple mashed potatoes!

For fun I roasted one of each of the potatoes with just olive oil and salt to see if they were really ‘All Purpose’.

They were all delicious but two really stood out when roasted. The Purple Viking was so creamy and buttery and the Masquerade was so fluffy and light. The Yukon Gold was really fluffy too, look at that!

Here is a photo of a pan of the 5 different varieties roasted. You hope you can see the difference of moisture content and how it affects texture.