We invite you to pause for a brief experiment. For just a moment, imagine a world without potatoes. Picture all the fabulous dishes from cuisines all around the world that would now be missing the delicious flavor, robust texture, and healthful nutrition provided by this vegetable. This would mean no mashed potatoes, no hashed potatoes—and none that could be baked or boiled, roasted or grilled, pureed or used in a soup, no au gratin, no scalloped, no potato salad. No sweet potato noodles and no sweet potato pie. You get the idea. The world would be much less flavorful without the exceptionally versatile potato, right? Fortunately, you don’t need to go without. In fact, you can enjoy a cornucopia of potato goodness because the Chef’s Garden is regeneratively farming sweet potatoes and a variety of traditional potatoes to ensure you have exactly the sizes, flavors, and textures you need for your creative dishes and menus. We’ve got your back. Rainbow of Potato Flavors To demonstrate the possibilities, consider:
Austrian crescent fingerling potatoes: Use this potato when you’re looking for ones with an eggy cake-like quality and a slightly creamy, bittersweet flavor. Texture is dense in these golden-hued beauties.
Gullauga potatoes: Rich and earthy, this potato variety is distinguished by a yellow ring—round or egg shaped—when they’re cut in half. Yellow on the outside, they have medium-deep reddish eyes.
Purple majesty potatoes: Enjoy the rich, nutty flavor of this purple-skinned potato with a tomato-like skin. Flesh is beautifully amethyst with this oval-shaped vegetable maintaining a rich color when cooked.
Yellow creamer potatoes: Delicious, buttery, and velvety, these oval potatoes have thin, smooth skin in hues ranging from tan to light gold with speckles of light brown and flesh in shades of pale yellow to gold.
Our mixed potatoes, meanwhile, give you the best of the day’s harvest. Potato Recipes We’re always amazed at the delicious potato recipes our treasured chefs create such as Chef Jehangir Mehta and his Persian Potato Egg recipe and mixologist Jeffrey Naples and his Purple Potato Cocktail. We encourage you to browse through more amazing potato recipes, including Chef Jamie Simpson’s Pomme Rosti. Plus, here’s Mrs. Beeton’s famous potato pudding recipe. Ingredients
½ lb. of mashed potatoes
2 oz. of butter
2 eggs
¼ pint of milk
3 tablespoonfuls of sherry
¼ saltspoonful of salt
the juice and rind of 1 small lemon
2 oz. of sugar
Mode Boil sufficient potatoes to make ½ lb. when mashed; add to these the butter, eggs, milk, sherry, lemon-juice, and sugar; mince the lemon-peel very finely and beat all the ingredients well together. Put the pudding into a buttered pie-dish and bake for rather more than ½ hour. To enrich it, add a few pounded almonds, and increase the quantity of eggs and butter. Time ½ hour, or rather longer. Health Benefits of Potatoes Besides being incredibly delicious, potatoes are also nutritious. WebMD.com notes the following benefits:
Digestive health
Reduced risk of heart disease
Lowered risk of cancer
Better blood pressure
The medical site also recommends that, to maximize health benefits, “choose colorful types such as purple potatoes. The more color in the potato, the more antioxidants it contains.” Health.com, meanwhile, notes these health benefits of potatoes:
Nutrient rich
Supports nerve and muscle function
May help with weight control
MedicalNewsToday.com shares these benefits:
Bone health
Reducing inflammation
Skin health
Immunity boosts
Plus, independent testing has verified that crops that are regeneratively farmed at The Chef’s Garden have up to 500% more in mineral content when compared to the USDA baseline. Brief History of the Potato Smithsonian shares how the potato changed the world and contributed to the growth of western culture. When the potato was introduced to Europe, it probably ended the current famine and allowed rapidly growing populations to have enough food to eat. When first introduced, it was a strange new vegetable and, to help people feel comfortable with it, France’s king, Louis XVI, was said to put a potato blossom in his buttonhole to convince French farmers to grow these tubers and to persuade people to eat them. It led to a fashion trend for aristocratic men in the country as they “swanned around with potato plants on their clothes” and perhaps Queen Marie Antoinette put these blossoms in her hair. Potatoes in Pop Culture Before we switch to the subject of sweet potatoes, we thought we’d share some fun facts about potatoes in pop culture. Sir Francis Drake apparently brought the potato to Europe from South America. In 1853, an honorary monument was erected in Germany of Drake as he carried a handful of potatoes. Unfortunately, the statue has since been torn down. Next, there’s Mr. Potato Head, a toy that comes with a potato-shaped head and customizable parts such as eyes, ears, noses, and mouths—even shoes. Mr. Potato appeared on the extremely popular Toy Story movies and a Mrs. Potato head toy also exists. When this toy first came out, it didn’t come with the plastic potato. Instead, families needed to supply the vegetable and the toy just came with the add-on parts. Here’s more pop culture lore. A man named Zack Danger Brown set up a Kickstarter campaign, saying that he needed $110 to make potato salad. If you donated, you could receive a hat, a t-shirt, a recipe book—even a picture of Zack making his recipe. So, how much money did he raise in this way? More than $55,000! Sweet Potatoes Sweet potatoes also come in a spectrum of delicious flavors and eye-catching hues. Here are delicious examples:
Burgundy sweet potatoes: Marvelously well balanced, this gorgeous spud offers up peppery, sweet, and slightly salty flavors, creamy and spicy. When raw, you’ll experience fruity notes; baked, it’s oh-so pleasantly sweet. Brilliant orange flesh is smooth and jam-like, easy to peel.
Copper penny sweet potatoes: Envision the flavors of roasted carrot, fall squash, and grilled lemon—the palate of autumn. Texture resembles fall squash, too, rich and dense, and this sweet potato variety absolutely bursts with beta-carotene.
Crème brulee sweet potatoes: This unique treasure offers up a blend of intriguing flavors: custard cream, crème anglaise, malted vanilla and cane sugar caramel. Smooth in texture, this vegetable provides a clean finish and is perfect for chefs who want to offer their diners an unexpected take on the sweet potato.
Crown jewel sweet potato: This versatile tuber adds just the right flavors to savory dishes and sweet ones alike, ideal for frying. This smooth sweet potato comes with a waxy, dense texture, and it provides diners with the nutritional benefits of purple vegetables.
Also consider our mixed sweet potatoes for the absolute best of the day’s harvest. Sweet Potato Recipes This is the perfect season for the Root Vegetable Tarte Tatin with BliS Gourmet recipe along with plenty of other sweet potato recipes. Plus, comote en dulce puts the yum-yum in ho-hum. Translating into “sweet potato in sugar,” many people in Mexican homes enjoy this delicacy around the holidays and, in some areas, vendors sell this dish in outdoor markets. When sold outside from a cart, vendors serve prepared sweet potatoes whole, first topped with milk and piloncillo syrup. Eat, right where you are, with a spoon! Or you can take yours home for the family. Health Benefits of Sweet Potatoes Healthline.com notes these benefits:
Highly nutritious
Promotes gut health
May help to prevent cancer
Supports healthy vision
Enhances brain function
Helps immune systems
Delicious and nutritious! Not Just a Thanksgiving Vegetable Anymore Once upon a time, sweet potatoes were largely considered a Thanksgiving vegetable but their consumption, year-round, keeps going up. In fact, between 2000 and 2017, the number of sweet potatoes eaten in the United States has nearly doubled—partly because of the popularity of sweet potato fries and partly because restaurants are increasingly serving them (thank you, chefs!). At The Chef’s Garden, we bring these beauties to the surface using a potato digger that gently turns the soil. Our farm team will then rake their fingers through the soil to pull out heavy bundles that resemble bunches of fat bananas. That said, varieties have different looks. Some are long and slender, like a carrot, while others are shaped more like traditional potatoes. We harvest ours at the peak of flavor. Left in the ground too long, they can lose their flavor and color, and become fibrous. Smaller ones, though, put the sweetness into sweet potatoes, having deliciously concentrated flavor and color with a pleasing texture. As a side note, if you can stop by Farmer Jones Farm’s farmer’s market (we hope you can!), you can see one of Isaac Hoover’s potato diggers in the barn. Hoover, a 19th-century Erie County farmer in Ohio, invented this digger in 1884-1885 to harvest his crop. Order Your Potatoes and Sweet Potatoes Please let your product specialist know what you need for your dishes and menus—and feel free to ask what’s at the peak of freshness and flavor.