Have you ever seen purple potatoes? We had not until Nick came upon them at one of the produce shops in Kensington Market. He bought some to give them a try.
Here we were thinking that these were a new vegetable, a result of experiments in cross-breeding … “beets and potatoes maybe?”, we wondered. But in fact, purple potatoes are an ancient food, native to Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador and are among the many varieties of potatoes that have been cultivated in these regions for more than 8000 years.
Nutritionally, they are better than regular potatoes due to their deep colour, which provides more antioxidants. For our serving Nick just added a bit of sea-salt and olive oil and he roasted them in the oven. Taste-wise they were very similar to regular potatoes, though they were more dry in texture.
But it was the way they looked that took the cake. They were gorgeous on the plate!
Being a lover of spuds in general, now I’m very curious about the supposed thousands of potato types out there, having only tried Yukon Gold (my favourite), small new, red-skinned, Idaho, fingerling and baking potatoes, as far as I can remember. How about you? Have you ever tried purple potatoes before or even seen them for sale? Any other types to recommend?
Here’s a link to a fact-sheet about these tiny tubers Purple Potato Information
Thanks for visiting,
xo loulou
(ps. let’s pretend that this Food Friday post is not actually being posted on Saturday!)
