The potato goes to the tuber family, they are the enlarged portion of the underground stem which is named a tuber and is planned to deliver food for the green leafy portion of the plant. If permitted to flower and fruit, the potato plant will stand an unbeatable fruit like a tomato. Potatoes, whose mysterious underground swellings make better use of their patch of ground than any cereal, are one of the world's most important food crops.
They are the most obliging and good-natured vegetable. Easy to grow, cheap to buy, simple to cook and tremendously filling, they also seem to be the one vegetable, apart perhaps from tomatoes, that nobody ever seems to get tired of There are almost endless varieties of it about 80 in Britain alone. Popular varieties change rapidly, coming into the flavour with the growers because they keep well or are resistant to disease, and then being ousted by newer, even hardier kinds with higher yields or fewer eyes.
This makes it extremely difficult to prepare a catalogue of varieties. However, different types of potatoes, round, oval or kidney-shaped, pink, red, and white or, more rarely, blue or purple potatoes, do have very different qualities, and a well-informed supplier will be able to tell you which variety is which. There are floury or mealy potatoes, ideal for mashing and baking, but annoying if you want to boil them whole as they tend to fall apart in the water.
They are also useless for making chips. there are very firm, fleshed and not at all good for mashing because they become glutinous, but they make excellent salads, lovely boiled and delicious gratins when they are cooked in slices that are supposed to remain whole. There is also all-purpose well as different varieties there are, as of course, new and old potatoes. New potatoes are not a specific variety, but any harvested when small and young.
Special varieties that go under the name of earlier are usually dug between June and August, while they are still small and sweet. Main crop, or old potatoes, are lifted from late summer onwards when they are mature and fully grown and have converted their sugar into starch. The main crop can be stored through the winter and until the beginning of the next season when the new potatoes always tremendously welcome reappear. An only baked potato will also deliver you with above 3 grams of fibre, but remember the fibre is generally in their skin.
Buying and Storing Potatoes
New potatoes should be small and faintly translucent under a coating of slightly damp loam or if ready -washed, they should be taught and shiny. If the skin is a little ragged and so tender that you can pull it off in strips, so much the better this shows that are fresh and will be easy to scrape. New potatoes do not keep particularly well, becoming more difficult to scrape (in which case scrub them and cook them in their skins). They also lose their flavour after a few days, so buy them in small quantities and keep them in a cool, dark place.
Old potatoes are more amenable and can be stored in a cool, dark, dry place for months on end. Choose dry with some earth on them, free of sprouts and without the green patches that appear when are exposed to light these contain poisonous alkaloids. If your potatoes do have green parts, cut them off. Avoid that have scaly or rotting patches. If buying washed in plastic bags, avoid those that look damp or show signs of condensation as you may find that they have an unpleasant, moldy flavour.
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