Thread: Cooking facts or fallacy

I like Desiree spuds for roasties but cost an arm and a leg in Villa. Here is a great site all about spuds

Imo, Spud's we get here in LOS are not great, Some of the bigger white spuds can be mashed / roasted to a level that's ok. The smaller "new spuds " are usually
not fit for purpose. Coming from Ireland I used to moan about English spud's { with good reason } Although King Edwards etc are decent roastie's. I'd kill
for a bag of kerr's pink's. I mean I would really !! Spud's are not meant to taste
waxy, there supposed to taste earthy and fluffy

They are low in starch.

^
Fact ?

fact.

Different spuds have different characteristics. Starchy spuds are better for frying, waxy spuds better for steaming or boiling.

In Thailand, I've noticed the local spuds are often a pale yellow colour inside, rather than the white I'm used to. They're not great for chipping, but actually they're quite tasty in their own right- and fine for boiling, baking or sauteing. Whilst they might not match Premium spuds back home, they compare just fine to standard supermarket spuds in the west as far as I'm concerned (ie 80% + of the market), in fact I'd say they have more flavour. I don't know why that is- maybe the organic richness of the soil they're grown on here, but thats just a wild guess.

Originally Posted by dirtydog

I was on the phone today and we were talking about potatoes, yes a bit unusual as I don't normally talk about potatoes on the phone, but it suddenly dawned on me why chips or French fries as the Americans like to call them are really shite in Thailand.

Now we have numerous threads on here about the problems of making pastry dough due to the ambient temperatures and some unusual ways of over coming this little problem.

So onto chips and roast potatoes, now in most countries we keep our potatoes in a cool dark place, so when we start to prepare the potatoes they are at about 60 degrees, here they are at about 85 degrees, is this starting temperature what makes chips and roast potatoes in Thailand so crap?

My Mrs bought 10kg of large potatoes a while back and I'm not eating anywhere near as much as I used to so yesterday, rather then let them go to waste, I cut a heap of chips and half cooked them and then froze them.
Can't get much cooler and darker than in a freezer so I'll see how they turn out next time I feel like a few chips.