The Potato

Potatoes

Throughout America, potatoes are the most popular vegetable, even being ahead of other well known vegetables such as lettuce and onions. You can cook potatoes in a variety of ways, and they are included in one out of three meals eaten by almost all Americans. When they are prepared in a healthy way, a potato can be an excellent source of energy and also pack a nutritional punch.

Like oranges, potatoes are very high in vitamin C. The fact is, one medium potato contains 45% of the vitamin C that's recommended for good health. Potatoes are also high in fiber and carbohydrates and contain more potassium than a banana.

A potato is naturally low in calories and contains no fat, sodium, or cholesterol. The skins of the potatoes provide a helpful dose of fiber, iron, potassium, calcium, zinc, phosphorus, and several B vitamins.

You can prepare potatoes by boiling them, steaming them, or even roasting them. If at all possible, you should avoid putting potatoes in the refrigerator or freezing them, as cold will turn the potato starch to sugar and cause them to turn dark when they are cooked.

When you store potatoes, keep them in a cool, dark place. Too much light will cause them to turn green. You can store them in the basement if you have one, as the basement is the best place to keep potatoes.

From mashed potatoes to baked potatoes, a potato is something we all know and love. They serve many different tasty foods, and they provide our bodies with plenty of healthful benefits. We all eat potatoes, some of us even grow our own. Whether you grow your own or buy them, the potato is the one vegetable that makes everything just a little bit better.

Discovering the Potato

The potato is a starchy, tuberous crop from the perennial Solanum tuberosum of the Solanaceae family. Potato may refer to the plant itself as well. In the region of the Andes, there are some other closely related cultivated potato species. Potato is the world's most widely grown tuber crop, and the fourth largest food crop in terms of fresh produce after rice, wheat, and corn.

Wild potato species occur from the United States to Uruguay and Chile. Genetic testing of the wide variety of cultivars and wild species suggest that the potato has a single origin in the area of southern Peru, Lay summary from a species in the Solanum brevicaule complex. However, although Peru is essentially the birthplace of the potato, today over 99% of all cultivated potatoes worldwide are descendants of a subspecies indigenous to south-central Chile. Based on historical records, local agriculturalists, and DNA analyses, the most widely cultivated variety worldwide, Solanum tuberosum tuberosum, is believed to be indigenous to Chiloe Archipelago where it was cultivated by the indigenous people.

The potato was introduced to Europe in 1536, and subsequently by European mariners to territories and ports throughout the world. Thousands of varieties persist in the Andes, where over 100 varieties might be found in a single valley, and a dozen or more might be maintained by a single agricultural household. Once established in Europe, the potato soon became an important food staple and field crop. But lack of genetic diversity, due to the fact that very few varieties were initially introduced, left the crop vulnerable to disease. In 1845, a plant disease known as late blight, caused by the fungus-like oocmycete Phytophthora infestans, spread rapidly through the poorer communities of western Ireland, resulting in the crop failures that led to the Great Irish Famine.

The annual diet of an average global citizen in the first decade of the twenty-first century would include about 33 kilograms (or 73 lbs.) of potato. However, the local importance of potato is extremely variable and rapidly changing. The potato remains an essential crop in Europe (especially eastern and central Europe), where per capita production is still the highest in the world, but the most rapid expansion of potato over the past few decades has occurred in southern and eastern Asia. China is now the world's largest potato producing country, and nearly a third of the world's potatoes are harvested in China and India. More generally, the geographic shift of potato production has been away from wealthier countries toward lower-income areas of the world.

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Potato Plants

Potatoes are generally grown from the eyes of another potato and not from seed. Home gardeners often plant a piece of potato with two or three eyes in a hill of mounded soil. Commercial growers plant potatoes as a row crop using seed tubers, young plants or microtubers and may mound the entire row. Seed potato crops are 'rogued' in some countries to eliminate diseased plants or those of a different variety from the seed crop.

Bowl Of Ridged Potato Chips

Many different "recipes" have been "invented" at different times and in different places. Some believe that the original potato chip recipe was created by chef George Crum, who was of Native American and African American descent, at Moon's Lake House near Saratoga Springs, New York, on August 24, 1853. Fed up with a customer who continued to send his fried potatoes back complaining that they were too thick and soggy, Crum decided to slice the potatoes so thin that they couldn't be eaten with a fork. As they couldn't be fried normally in a pan, he decided to stir-fry the potato slices. Against Crum's expectation, the guest was ecstatic about the new chips and they soon became a regular item on the lodge's menu, under the name "Saratoga Chips." They eventually became popular throughout New York and New England. One version of this story credits John Harvey Kellogg (the brother of the Dr. Kellogg who founded the company which bears the family name) as the customer who wanted them thinner; another wrongly identifies him as Cornelius Vanderbilt.

The owners of the restaurant Schweizerhaus in Wurstelprater, Vienna's largest permanent amusement park, claim that their site is where what they call Rohscheiben (raw slices) was invented.

An earlier reference to what are now known as potato chips is Alexis Soyer's recipe in "Shilling Cookery for People" (1845). Here raw potatoes, "almost shavings" are fried. Earlier still, Mary Randolph's book "The Virginia House-wife" (1824) has a part titled "To fry Sliced Potatoes" here raw potatoes are cut into slices or thin shavings and fried "till they are crisp."

In the 20th century, potato chips spread beyond chef-cooked restaurant fare and began to be mass produced for home consumption; Dayton, Ohio-based Mike-sell's Potato Chip Company, founded in 1910, calls itself the "oldest potato chip company in the United States".

Before the airtight sealed bag was developed, chips were stored in barrels or tins which allowed them to go stale and damp. Then Laura Scudder invented the potato chip bag by ironing together two pieces of waxed paper, thereby creating an airtight seal and keeping the chips fresh until opened. In 1934 Akron, Ohio, potato chip maker K.T. Salem was the first to distribute chips in glassine waxed paper bags. Today, chips are packaged in plastic bags, with nitrogen gas blown in prior to sealing in order to lengthen shelf life and provide protection against crushing.

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Lamb, Potatoes and Bottle of Wine at Table Setting

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A baked potato, also known as a jacket potato when given additional fillings such as cheese or chicken, is the edible result of baking a potato. When well cooked, a baked potato has a fluffy interior, but a crispy skin. Potatoes can be baked in a conventional oven, convection oven, a microwave oven, on a grill, or on/in an open fire. Some restaurants use special ovens designed specifically to cook large numbers of potatoes, and keep them warm ready for service.

Prior to cooking, the potato is cleaned, and possibly basted with oil or butter, and/or salt. Pricking the potato with a fork or knife allows steam to escape during the cooking process. Potatoes cooked in a microwave without pricking the skin can explode due to built up internal pressure from unvented steam. It takes between one and two hours to bake a potato in a conventional oven. Microwaving takes about six minutes but does not generally produce a crisp skin.
Some varieties of potato such as Russet and King Edward potato are more suitable for baking than others, due to both their size and consistency...

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Golden Crisp French Fries

French fries, chips, fries, or French-fried potatoes are thin slices of potato that have been deep-fried. A distinction is sometimes made between fries and chips, whereby North Americans refer to any pieces of fried potatoes as fries, while in the UK, long thin strips of potatoes are sometimes called fries to contrast them with the thickly cut strips, which are always referred to as chips. French fries are known as frites or pommes frites in many parts of Europe.

Belgians claim that "French" fries are in fact Belgian, but definitive evidence for the origin is difficult to present. Belgian historian Jo Gerard recounts that potatoes were already fried in 1680 in the Spanish Netherlands, in the area of "the Meuse valley between Dinant and Liège, Belgium. The poor inhabitants of this region allegedly had the custom of accompanying their meals with small fried fish, but when the river was frozen and they were unable to fish, they cut potatoes lengthwise and fried them in oil to accompany their meals.

The Dutch concur with a Southern Netherlandish or Belgian origin when referring to Vlaamse frieten ('Flemish fries'). In 1857, the newspaper Courrier de Verviers devotes an article to Fritz (assumed pun with 'frites'), a Belgian entrepreneur selling French fries at fairs, calling them "le roi des pommes de terre frites" (The king of fried potatoes). In 1862, a stall selling French fried potatoes (see frietkot) called "Max en Fritz" was established near Het Steen in Antwerp.

A Belgian legend claims that the term "French" was introduced when British or American soldiers arrived in Belgium during World War I, and consequently tasted Belgian fries. They supposedly called them "French", as it was the official language of the Belgian Army at that time. But the term "French fried potatoes" had been in use in America long before the Great War.

Whether or not Belgians invented them, "frites" became the national snack and a substantial part of both national dishes - making the Belgians their largest per capita consumers in Europe, and their "symbolic" creators.

France

Many Americans attribute the dish to France - although in France they are almost exclusively thought of as Belgian - and offer as evidence a notation by U.S. President Thomas Jefferson. "Pommes de terre frites à cru, en petites tranches" ("Potatoes deep-fried while raw, in small cuttings") are noted in a manuscript in Thomas Jefferson's hand (circa 1801-1809) and the recipe almost certainly comes from his French chef, Honoré Julien. It is worth noting, though, that France had recently annexed what is now Belgium, and would retain control over it until the Congress of Vienna of 1815 brought it under Dutch control. In addition, from 1813 on, recipes for what can be described as French fries, occur in popular American cookbooks. By the late 1850s, one of these mentions the term "French fried potatoes".

Recipes for fried potatoes (not clearly specified how) in French cookbooks date back at least to Menon's Les soupers de la cour (1755). It is true that eating potatoes was promoted in France by Parmentier, but he did not mention fried potatoes in particular. And the name of the dish in languages other than English does not refer to France; in French, they are simply called "pommes de terres frites" or, more commonly, simply "pommes frites" or 'frites'.

Spain

Some claim that the dish was invented in Spain, the first European country in which the potato appeared via the New World colonies, and assumes the first appearance to have been as an accompaniment to fish dishes in Galicia,[citation needed] from which it spread to the rest of the country and further to the Spanish Netherlands, more than a century before Belgium was created there.

Professor Paul Ilegems, curator of the Friet-museum in Antwerp, Belgium, believes that Saint Teresa of Ávila fried the first chips, referring also to the tradition of frying in Mediterranean cuisine.

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Potato Salads

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The indispensable kitchen tool! Peels potatoes, fruits and vegetables instantly, at the push of a button! The Deluxe Rotato® Express is the amazing peeling machine that peels away potato, vegetables and fruit skins in seconds in one fast, easy motion! Best of all, the Deluxe Rotato® Express peels just the skin, without wasting any of the nutritious part of the fruit or vegetable. To use the Deluxe Rotato® Express, simply center the food on the bottom spokes and press gently. Then, lower the upper section so that it grasps the food and holds it securely...