Cooking Lesson #947 A Primer on Potatoes & Bareback Baked Potatoes recipe

…for your Holiday Table from the Perspectives’ Kitchen

Bareback Baked Potato

How you doin’? I used to love French Fries or anything else fried. French fries were a staple in my weekly--if not--daily diet. Then came Covid and I stopped eating out. As much as I love fried foods, I don’t like to cook them at home. And air fryers, as good as they are, just don’t do it for me in the same way deep frying does. I, like many others, was challenged to provide three meals a day and snacks for my family which became the Perspectives Survival Guide blogs. But enough about Covid and blogs and more about POTATOES!
 
The humble potato is a miraculous vegetable, but Americans are eating less of them than ever before and have ditched fresh potatoes for frozen processed potatoes. I declare it is time to rethink the lowly tuber!

According to Chris Voigt, whose long career as a potato-pusher started in the potato frenzy of the late 1990s. In 1996 the United States hit peak potato consumption—Americans were eating 64 pounds of spuds each year—more than at any point since modern records began in 1970. A record-breaking harvest had flooded the country with so many spuds that the government had to pay farmers to give them away. At the White House, the Clintons were pushing potatoes—fried, marinated, boiled, garlicked—at State Dinners onto princesses, kings and presidents at all official banquets.
 
“It was a crazy time,” says Chris Voigt, “You could literally buy super-sized buckets of French fries at McDonald’s.” But as Voigt made his way up in the potato industry, all the way to executive director of the Washington State Potato Commission, the American potato was undergoing a dramatic shift in fortunes.
 
Today, the average American is now eating 30 percent fewer potatoes than during the happy meal days of the Clintons, down to an all-time low of 45 pounds per year. The drop in consumption of fresh potatoes—for boiling, roasting, mashing, and steaming—has been even faster. In 2019, frozen potato consumption overtook fresh potatoes for the first time, opening up a rift that has continued to widen since the Covid pandemic. Most of those frozen potatoes are eaten as French fries.
 
Once this miraculous nutrient-dense vegetable was the fuel of human civilization. Now, in the US, the spud has become synonymous with an industrialized food system that pours profits into a handful of companies at the expense of our citizens’ health. Have we lost the fight against the tide of frozen fries and hash browns, or is there hope for a potato rescue?
 
The white potato is a criminally underrated food. Compared with other carb-loaded staples like pasta, white bread, or rice, potatoes are rich in vitamin C, potassium, and fiber. They’re also surprisingly high in protein. If you hit your daily calorie goal by eating only potatoes, then you’d also exceed your daily goal for protein, which is 56 grams for a man aged 31–50.
 
Chris Voigt knows this because for 60 days in 2010 he ate nothing but potatoes. And a little oil. For two months Voigt didn’t just survive on potatoes, he thrived. By the end of his diet he had lost 21 pounds, his cholesterol was down 41 percent, and he’d stopped snoring. Voigt proved that the potato is highly nutritious, no matter how you eat—whether you boil it or fry it, cook it in the oven or steam it.
“Nutritionally and scientifically, it made sense—potatoes are loaded with exactly the kinds of vitamins that people need. “They’re pretty amazing in my opinion,” says Joanne Slavin, a nutrition professor at the University of Minnesota who helped come up with the 2010 federal dietary guidelines for Americans, which counted potatoes in the recommendation that people eat 2.5 cups of vegetables each day.
 
Potatoes aren’t just amazing from a nutritional point of view—they are one of the original disruptive food technologies. First domesticated in the Andes and then brought to Europe by Spanish colonizers in the mid-1500s, wherever potatoes were grown they supercharged local societies. Potatoes were well suited to growing in cool, wet, European climates and produced veritable bounties compared with established crops like wheat, barley, and oats.
 
An acre of field could serve up over 10 metric tons (~22,000#) of potatoes, according to the diary of an 18th-century British farmer. The same area of wheat would yield only 650 kilograms (~1430#), so it’s little wonder that leading thinkers started singing the potato’s praises. “No food can afford a more decisive proof of its nourishing quality, or of its being peculiarly suitable to the health of the human constitution,” wrote the philosopher Adam Smith in his influential treatise The Wealth of Nations.
 
“Potatoes can be grown in small plots and marginal land,” says Nathan Nunn, an economist at the University of British Columbia who wrote a paper concluding that the introduction of the potato accounted for about a quarter of the population growth in the Old World between 1700 and 1900. Settlements close to areas that were suitable for potato cultivation grew and urbanized more quickly. French soldiers born in villages that could grow potatoes were a half-inch taller in the years after the potato came to the country.
 
Nowhere in Europe was the promise of the potato more evident than in Ireland. The potato probably reached its shores in the early 17th century. A century later the population had doubled to 2 million, and by 1845 it had soared to 8.5 million people—more than 90 percent of whom were utterly dependent on the potato, writes John Reader in Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent. When a fungal disease wiped out nearly all of Ireland’s potato harvest in 1845, over a million people died in what became known as the Great Famine, and a similar number emigrated to North America, Australia, or to Great Britain—where the government continued to export grain, meat and even potatoes from Ireland despite the raging famine.
 
The same qualities that made potatoes a runaway success in Europe—their cheapness, ubiquity, and nutritional density—are a large part of why in recent years they have acquired the status of a second-class vegetable. One Danish observational study found that eating a lot of potatoes—unlike other vegetables—was associated with a higher risk of type 2 diabetes. Other studies have found that potato consumption is linked to cardio-metabolic risk factors like high blood pressure and cholesterol, but the evidence on whether this leads to more disease and deaths is murky.
 
The issue is not so much the potato itself, but the way we eat potatoes and how that has changed over time. Americans now eat 21 pounds of frozen (mostly fried) potatoes and a further 3.7 pounds of potato chips each year. And while deep-frying potatoes doesn’t deplete their nutritional content (it actually increases levels of dietary fiber), it does add a whole bunch of fat and salt, which we know are not all that good for you.
 
Personally, I hate it when we try to simplify things and put healthy foods over here and unhealthy foods over there. As my mother used to say, “everything in moderation.” You really have to look at the entire diet that you’re consuming.
 
The demands of the frozen potato industry have also shaped which potatoes make it into fields, says Mark Taylor, a retired potato researcher. Potatoes destined for potato chips need to be relatively dry and low in sugar, which helps them take up oil and stops them from browning too quickly as they’re deep-fried. McDonald’s is picky about which potato it uses for its fries, which is partly why a single variety—the Russet Burbank—accounts for about 70–80 percent of all frozen French fry production in the U.S. and Canada.
 
This dominance of a few potato varieties is one reason why spuds have also lagged behind other staple crops in terms of development. Yield is a measure of how much crop is produced in a given acre of farmland. Improvements in fertilizer, equipment, farming techniques and crop varieties all push yields upwards, which means we can grow more food on less land.
 
Global yields of wheat, maize and rice have all risen by more than 150 percent since the 1960s, but potato yields have only increased by around 72 percent. A big part of the problem is that potatoes’ genetics make it fiendishly difficult to breed more productive varieties. “It’s a nightmare to breed,” says Taylor, but pressure from climate change and new diseases means that we’ll have to try harder to unlock new potential from this maybe-miraculous crop.
 
The potato is also struggling to generate the enthusiasm it once did in the English-speaking world. At the same time as becoming synonymous with its least healthy preparations, the potato has been squeezed at the margins by the rise of pasta and rice in the Western diet, as well as being a victim of the low-carb diets popularized in the 1990s and 2000s.
 
The potato industry is also arming itself to fight back against what it sees as nutritional misinformation. The marketing and promotion board Potatoes USA is using AI social media listening tools to find examples of “inaccurate nutrition information” online and respond.

The potato is ripe to be rebranded, but the industry has nothing like the marketing resources of the beef or dairy industry, which have poured millions into efforts to remain central to the American diets. Potatoes USA has its tools and is trying to nudge amateur athletes to join “Team Potato” with branded jackets and running gear. Compare that with the iconic long-running campaign from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association: “Beef—it’s what’s for dinner.” Now it might be plated right next to a baked potato.
Finding new ways to prepare and present potatoes to your family will increase the interest and desire for more. My recipe for Bareback Baked Potatoes will surely add surprise to your Thanksgiving table this year.
 
                                                    Bareback Baked Potatoes
Prep Time:  3 minutes
Cook Time:  50-60 minutes
Total Time:  1 hour+
Yield:  4 servings

Ingredients 
4 large potatoes (I prefer large Russets)
1 stick unsalted butter
2 thinly sliced garlic cloves,
Kosher salt, to taste
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
1 cup shredded Cheese (I prefer medium aged cheddar cheese)
Garnish with, butter, sour cream, scallions, bacon
 
Directions

1. Preheat oven to 425°F.
2. Line a sheet pan with foil and lightly spray it with food release.
3. Using a sharp knife, make thin slices into the potato, into rounds, being SURE not to cut through the potato.
4. Place the cut potatoes on the foil lined baking sheet.
5. Melt 1/2 of the stick of butter and drizzle over potatoes. Insert a few pieces of thinly sliced garlic in between cuts of the potatoes. Season with salt and pepper.
6. Bake for 45-55 minutes, until the outside is tender, and the inside of each potato is soft. When done, remove from oven.
7. Turn oven to a broil.
8. Melt remaining 1/2 stick of butter and drizzle over potatoes.
9. Sprinkle potatoes with cheese.
10. Return to oven until cheese is bubbling.

8. Top with desired garnishes. Serve immediately.

ChefSecret:  Try using different cheese for different entrees. I like to use pepperjack cheese as a spicy alternative. If you want to bring the whole sliced potato to the table, use an oven and broiler-safe serving dish, lightly sprayed with food release.

Quip of the Day:  Q. What’s a potato’s favorite horror movie? A. The Silence of the Yams!
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Do you have a question or comment?  Send your thoughts to [email protected]. All recipes and cooking tips are posted on our website https://www.perspectives-la.com/covid-19-survival-guide.
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To you and everyone dear to you, be strong, positive, kind, thankful, and stay well and safe. Take a breath and count your blessings, and if you have a little extra to share with others, including those still suffering the effects of the recent hurricanes. Please consider donating to Feeding America, Tunnel to Towers, Union Rescue Mission, Samaritan’s Purse and/or American Red Cross.

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