Chatting Potatoes on ABC Afternoons

I love dropping into ABC Radio Melbourne to chat about food with Clare Bowditch and her lovely audience of talkback callers. This time it was to discuss potatoes and, more specifically, whether it’s okay to have a chip sandwich – or chip butty. I was so inspired by the enthusiastic chat on Facebook on this topic that I felt inspired to make myself a crinkle-cut sanger for lunch today! Listen in below and tell me about your favourite potato dish in the comments.

 

 

Strong opinions about chip sandwiches:

• must be made with fresh bread so it squishes with the chips, chips must have chicken salt, and just a sprinkling of tomato sauce.
• only way to go: hot chip sandwiches with butter and tomato sauce.
• put salt & vinegar crisps in buttered white bread with sliced green apple and a little Vegemite for umami.
• buttered white bread with Samboys barbecue chippies.
• white bread. Cheese slice. Honey soy chips.
• white bread. Hot chips. Tomato sauce.
• burnt Scottish roll, plenty of butter and HP sauce, no other way, and a good cup of sweet hot English breakfast or IRN BRU tea.
• lots of butter, plain chips only, and very fresh squishy white bread – must be eaten straight away.
• a classic New Zealand sandwich is Vegemite (or Marmite if you’re a heathen) and potato chips.

I must agree with the tea comment – I drank a vat of tea to recover from eating my (two) sandwiches.

Spud dishes I love (or want to try):

• Potatoes boulangere – so called because people used to bring them to the boulangerie (bakery) to put in the bread oven. A layered bake with potatoes, onion, rosemary topped up with milk and stock.
• Potatoes Dauphinoise – thinly sliced and layered with butter, cream and melty cheese.
• Hasselback – cut into thin slices, but not all the way through, and roasted.
• Janssons frestelse (temptation) – a Swedish casserole of potatoes, onions, pickled sprats (anchovies), breadcrumbs and cream.
• Pommes Anna – thinly sliced potatoes layered with butter, then baked & inverted.
• Potato salads – my favourite salad potato is kipfler.
• Gnocchi – use Desiree for a good result.

And generally:

Floury potatoes are white fleshed, drier, denser and starchier. They’re good for baking, mashing, frying, roasting and making perfect golden chips. Look for sebago, king edward, coliban, kestrel, russet burbank.

Waxy potatoes are yellow fleshed, higher in moisture and lower in starch. They hold their shape when boiled or steamed and are great for salads, soups and casseroles. Look for nicola, bintje, kipfler and Dutch cream.

Recipes:

I’ve got some great potato recipes on my Dani Valent Cooking site. (You’ll need to be a subscriber to see most videos and recipes.) Zhoug and Salmon Salad is a frisky salad with steamed salmon, spuds and greens. My Inside-out Chicken Parmigiana is served with steamed then roasted potatoes. There’s a free version of that recipe here. US chef Grant Achatz potato-stuffed Pierogies are comforting, golden and gorgeous.