VARIETIES OF POTATOES

Bintje Oval		With white skin, golden flesh and great flavour, they are excellent chipped, boiled, roasted, used in salads or sliced for a winter gratin.

Delaware		Long and oval, with white skin and flesh, these are a good all-rounder. They crisp well, make good chips, are good in salads and can be baked and microwaved.

Desiree		Gorgeous, oval and golden fleshed. They are waxy, with a pink skin and are a good all-rounder.

Idaho Long		Oval and white skin and flesh, they are great for chips, wedges, roasting, baking and barbecue crisping.

Nicola Round or oval		With cream skin and waxy yellow flesh, they are lovely boiled, mash well, and make a great salad.

Spunta		Slightly pear-shaped, with cream skin and flesh. They are huge and are great baked, chipped, in gratin or mashed.

Pink fir-apple		A lovely creamy-fleshed small cigar-shaped potato. They make great salads - otherwise roast, boil or chip them.

Kipfler		Small, banana-shaped with yellow skin, cream flesh and a waxy texture. It is best steamed or boiled. Referred to as the sweet potato.

Pink-eye		A great favourite, wonderful boiled, mashed, stir-fried and as a salad.

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FOOD
The potato is the humblest of vegetables, and among the most popular. Steamed, stuffed, roasted, fried or boiled, the potato is ubiquitous.
Would roast beef be roast beef without its supporting cast of baked potatoes? Would France be France without French fries? For sheer weight of consumption, potatoes are rivalled only by wheat and rice.
Queensland alone produced 104,000 tonnes of potatoes for the domestic market. Inexpensive and nutritious, versatile yet unintrusive, potato is the food you can take anywhere. Within this starch tuber hides a rich lode of vitamin C and potassium.
Easy to grow and with a prodigious yield, potatoes serve as a buffer against starvation and an adornment to the tables of the well-to-do. Antoine Parmentier, who championed the potato in 18th century France, thought so highly of spuds that he sometimes entertained dinner guests with nothing else. Soup, entree, entrements, salad, cake, cookies - all made from potatoes. Today in culinary French, the word "parmentier" signifies just about any dish containing potatoes.
Hachis Parmentier - chopped beef covered with pureed potatoes and browned in the oven - is just one of many dishes honouring this potato visionary. Other Gallic favourites wearing his name include cream of potato soup, omelette filled with diced fried potatoes and potato garnish for lamb and veal.
Until Parmentier promoted potatoes as the dish most likely to shield French peasantry from starvation, the populace shunned spuds as causing leprosy. Potatoes do belong to the deadly nightshade family and contain traces of solanine, a toxin. In the 16th and 17th centuries, when solanine concentrations were higher, potatoes sometimes caused the skin to break out in a rash. Even now, wise cooks shun green potatoes, which no only taste bitter but can cause an upset stomach. Otherwise, if a potato looks good, you can probably eat it. Potatoes with rotten patches, holes or abrasions caused by handling should be rejected.
Give squeaky clean potatoes a swerve. They have probably been damaged by the high pressure hoses used to clean them. Make sure also, to select the right potato for the job.
The dry flesh of sebagoes is ideal for baking, roasting and mashing; moist sequoias suit boiling, roasting and salads; pink-skinned pontiacs are tasty but require longer cooking times; pink skinned desiree potatoes suit baking, steaming, roasting or salads; new potatoes are thin-skinned with moist flesh; mature potatoes, harvested three or four weeks later, have longer shelf life. At least 200 varieties of potato are grown around the world - all evolved from a single species cultivated by South American Indians in the high sierra of the Andies as long ago as 3000BC.
The first Europeans to taste Peruvian potatoes belonged to a Spanish expedition. From Spain, they spread to Italy where, as in Spain, they became the last gastronomical resort of the excruciatingly poor. Sir Francis Drake, meanwhile, who had been doing battle with Spain in the Caribbean, called into Cartegena, Colombia, to take on provisions, including potatoes for the return journey. En route, he picked up a party of disgruntled pioneers in Virginia.
Among them was a friend of Sir Walter Raleigh, who in 1586 gave Raleigh some potatoes to plant on his farm near Cork, Ireland. So it went. By the mid-18th century spuds were being cultivated not only in Ireland but in Scotland, Holland Germany and Italy. In New England, where potatoes were introduced by Irish immigrants, they became known as "Murphies". In Ireland itself, potatoes had become virtually the sole crop.
When the potato blight struck in 1845, it created widespread famine among the poor, who then had the pleasure of seeing better-off landholders exporting meat and other crops to Britain - as they starved to death.
Today agricultural science has refined the potato to maximum commercial yield with only marginal sacrifice to flavour and texture. Provided you don't boil out the nutritive value, peel away the best part with the skin or saturate your potato with fat, the potato is one of the healthiest vegetables around.
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