About food: potatoes

This is the second installment of a series on common food ingredients; the first was about corn. At Kartini Clinic we spend our lives restoring the health of our young patients. Their families look to us for advice (sensible advice) about food and eating, and this series is part of that.

To briefly recap, these little food blogs will have three sections:

“Your Grandmother’s” – fast, easy but still largely homemade
“A Cut Above” – for those who are really into being as healthy as possible, inconvenience be damned
“Portlandia” – for those of us (whether from Portland or not!) who are fanatic foodies and want only local and organic home cooking

I will include some citations at the end of each blog for those who wish to read further, or to challenge me (which I welcome; happens all the time).

Potatoes are featured on the Kartini meal plan as a suggested “starch” in a 6oz. serving size. Some people always eat either (white) potatoes or (white) bread with their dinner and find anything else unacceptably “adventurous”. Some people alternate them with sweet potatoes, quinoa, rice, tortillas, etc. Serve what your family will eat. My family is Irish-American and we grew up thinking of potatoes as the true staff of life. They are also gluten free, so that would make them popular again because of the current interest in gluten-free eating.

It turns out, though, there is more to potatoes than meets the eye. Too much, really, to make it easily digestible here, pun intended. Potatoes are a classic food that ancient humans found they could digest and use for energy, if cooked. Cooking most food is essential to digestibility and accessibility to our all-important intestinal bacteria. Potatoes must be cooked.

Yet it turns out that how you cook them matters to their nutritional value. And when I say potatoes, I do not mean sweet potatoes, which is an entirely different product of an entirely different plant family. Potatoes are from the Solanaceae family, along with tomatoes and eggplants. So-called sweet potatoes are from the morning glory family (Convolvulacea). Many young people avoid potatoes in favor of sweet potatoes in the belief that they have a lower glycemic index, but they do have more sugar: 6.5 grams vs 1.2, per 100g serving. Hence the nickname “sweet potato.” I say mix it up. Don’t be afraid of either.

Your Grandmother’s Approach

My grandmother was just happy to have enough potatoes to feed her six children. She had a root cellar, but most of us no longer do, of course. A root cellar is a thing of glory, with its earthen floor and damp walls, but it is not a realistic food storage option for most of us today. When it comes to potatoes, cool is good and cold is bad. Do not store potatoes in the refrigerator where they will get weird sweet flavors, but rather in a cool, dark place. If you do not have such a place, and you live in the city, buy only as much as you plan on using for a week and store them in your pantry. Remember, if you buy too many and you wind up throwing out half because they got green or withered or sprouty, you just paid twice as much for the potatoes you bought. You should have just bought fewer, paid more and been able to buy organic!

If you absolutely operate your food budget on a shoestring and can’t buy organic potatoes, you will have to peel them since scrubbing will only remove a fraction of the heavy pesticides used on this popular commercial crop. But when you peel them you lose most of their health-giving phytonutrients as well as most of the fiber.

A Cut Above

In the case of potatoes, eating a cut above means you should buy organic potatoes, to reduce exposure to poisons. And you will vary which potatoes you buy, depending on how adventurous you are, what is locally available and which potato does what the best. “Irish” (russet) potatoes are the best for baking in their skins, for french fries, and for mashing. New potatoes (thin skinned, waxy, smaller ones) apparently have a lower glycemic index and are better for boiling and for potato salad. Most kids love potato salad, so it’s a good thing to learn to make quickly: add celery and onions and pickles as part of their vegetables. Use mayonnaise as their fat, because adding a fat to potatoes slows down the process of digestion and creates a lower, slower rise in blood sugar. Apparently adding vinegar, as the Germans do to their version of potato salad or the English do on their French fries (“chips”), also does the same.

To shop and cook a cut above, buy organic and eat the skins.

Portlandia

Ah, here you can have some fun! If you always just go to your grocer and buy the same white potatoes in a big bag, and eat them cooked in the same way day in and day out, you are going to bore yourself to death and conclude that you hate cooking and dread shopping! Have some fun instead, on a Saturday. Nowadays we have lots of farmers’ markets. Some of us even grow our own potatoes. If you live in the city, that isn’t always possible. And since this is the Portlandia section of the blog, let it be known that the more brightly colored a potato is, the more phytonutrients it has. So experiment with purple.

But if purple potatoes give you (or your children) the willies, go for fingerlings, which have more phytonutrients than the others. But they are also more expensive.

And now a cool trick from Jo Malone, the author of Eating on the Wild Side: apparently cooling cooked potatoes in the refrigerator overnight causes them to have a lower glycemic index through the development of more (digestion) resistant starches. So ideally (as long as food scarcity is not your issue), whether you cook in the grandmother’s style, a cut above or in the Portlandia style, for maximum nutritional value cook your potatoes in their skins, refrigerate them overnight and reheat them in the morning or use them in a salad.

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