More on Potatoes

Yes, but is it floury?
First posted 20 September 2011 - https://sites.google.com/site/foodieshare/

Knowing your onions may be clever but knowing your potatoes would impress me more.

Apparently the Food Labelling Regulations 1996 require that all potatoes sold in the UK must be 'accompanied' with an indication of their variety – having just tried to read these regulations I still can't confirm whether it does or not. However most of those gigantic plastic bags of spuds on sale in our supermarkets do have the variety printed on then somewhere, even though the potatoes will probably have sprouted before you find it. Not so sure about loose potatoes, many just seem to be labelled as new or baking. In fact a survey by the FSA in 2003 found that nearly a quarter of potatoes on sale were labelled with the incorrect variety or not named at all...

Chance for a quick moan...

Why do supermarkets insist that we buy potatoes ready bagged in quite large quantities. I don't particularly use vast amounts of potato and end up throwing away as many as I eat, which to me is sacrilege. Potatoes used to be kept for months particularly over winter, now they seem to sprout and go soft almost over night. Please let me pick the potatoes I need and put them in a little bag, preferably paper - do the plastic bags potatoes come in degrade quicker than the plastic carriers that the same supermarkets discourage me from using – I think not!

Sorry, getting a bit carried away. What I really wanted to point out was even knowing the variety, with the exception perhaps of a couple of the more well known ones and the so called 'all rounders', do we really know what they are best for or if they 'waxy' or 'floury'? I know I don't!

Help is at hand. The good people at the Potato Council have a scale to measure floury-ness (the spell-checker didn't like that). The scale runs from 1-10 where 1 is the most waxy and 10 the most floury, much as the Scoville scale measures the heat of chillies, Beaufort – wind and Richter – earthquakes (allegedly 'lads' have been known to measure breaking wind on the Richter scale but surely the Beaufort scale would be more appropriate).

Here's a link to the Potato Council's Love Potatoes/varieties page which give lots of information as to floury scores . It also listed what they recommend each variety is best for. It does throw up a few anomalies, Accord (floury score 1) for wedges, Nadine (floury score 2) for mash, Duke of York (floury score 1) for roasties etc. It would be nice to be able to find these varieties to try them!

I'm sure we all have our own favourite potatoes for each use and far be it for me to tell you which variety to use for what but I would recommend Desiree for potato men, gives them a lovely pink face where a Rooster gives your man a booze induced angry purple one.

While checking to see if there were any other scales used for measuring the characteristics of fruit and vegetables I came across this item in the Edinburgh Evening News. It made me laugh but if you weren't amused with the earlier reference to flatulence you won't see the funny side of this.

http://edinburghnews.scotsman.com/news/Man-cleared-of-weighing-penis.6248019.jp

Update - The page linked to above appears to have been removed. I have tried to recreate it in Weights and Measures - Man accused of weighing his penis.