Atlantic Canada would make Samwise Gamgee proud. We’re just covered in ‘taters’ as he’d tell Gollum. Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick supply not only most of Canada’s spud needs but plenty cross the border to feed the eastern US. From ordinary bags of them in the market to McDonald’s insatiable industrial french fry demand they’re a commodity people can’t seem to get enough of although I notice the Americans have yet to truly discover the wonders of real poutine with it’s fresh cheese curds and gravy goodness. You can even get pale imitations in fast food joints north of the border though I wouldn’t recommend it. Get to Montreal or make your own I say.
I opened this week’s local grocery flyer to discover (fifty pound!) sacks ‘O potatoes on sale. The new crops of the year are starting to roll in. Guesses on cost? Fifty pounds of them? Whatever you guessed is probably too high. Six bucks for the bag. Yes, twelve cents a pound. At those rates I could feed all of Ireland if only I could keep the potatoes from going all sprouty and mushy over time in the pantry. I’m just one guy and the cats don’t like aloo gobi so getting through that many by myself can be long weeks of mash, gratin, and gnocchi. Delicious and tasty weeks but weeks nonetheless.
After some long term experiments, I’m happy to report real results on a bit of kitchen wisdom that’s been kicking around food storage circles for quite some time. I wanted to test for myself because the chemistry still baffles me a bit but I can’t argue with the end results. If you want your potatoes to stay firm and mostly sprout-free over the long haul, store them with an apple. You heard me, an ordinary apple. Or a pear if you’ve got them handy instead. Any sort seems to work. Here was my methodology.
Last December, I took several heavy cardboard boxes* and put five pounds of loose potatoes in each. I also filled two boxes with sweet potatoes in the same fashion just to confirm this works across a wide potato spectrum. No bagging – plastic, paper, or otherwise – they might have come packaged inside so as to encourage air flow was my thought. Into the various boxes I placed either a couple of apples from the farm, pears from the neighbours, or bananas not from the neighbours. I left a few with no additions at all as my junior scientist control group.To factor out the ambient conditions, all of the boxes were stored in the same cool, dry, dark room but in separate corners well apart from each other by at least ten feet. Dry is important because of potential mould growth. By dark I mean zero light 23.9 hours a day (the wine cellar) and by cool I mean under 10C (50F) which is close to what is suggested by any potato council you care to name. In reality, most of them say 5C but not in the fridge or below freezing. Those even lower temperatures convert starch in the potato to sugar which they say alters the taste negatively. Potato ice cream doesn’t sound good to me either.
* The boxes were in fact the heavy-duty (clean!) cardboard boxes that eighteen kilos of cat litter comes in with handle totes and an open, loose construct which promotes just the right amount of airflow. They’re free to re-purpose and dry cardboard is perfect for the task. They work well for other dry goods like onions as well. I also seem to accumulate stacks of the blasted things. Find a friend with a cat if you don’t. Better yet, adopt a cat or two.
No, I’ve not lost some sort of fruit salad sanity with these pairings. I won’t be making a Basil Fawlty “Ritz salad” with apples, grapefruit, & potatoes. I’m tapping into the unique ripening qualities of ethylene gas which is naturally produced by many fruits. It’s the same gas often artificially pumped over bananas to speed up their ripening and why when placed in a paper bag, they ripen faster on their own by trapping the gas they make themselves.
With potatoes, however, the theory is that it inhibits their tendency to sprout and go mushy as the tuber tries in vain to start a new plant in your pantry. That doesn’t seem exactly intuitive to me. If the ethylene ripens things faster, why wouldn’t it make potatoes progress as well? Several opinions are floating around on the net that this is in fact the case and advise against exactly what I was testing. Of course being the interwebs, there are just as many people proclaiming it’s the best solution for potato storage ever. You see why I had to test for myself. Pesky hive mind opinion.
The results were definitive. The ‘naked’ potatoes only lasted a couple of weeks which is why this solution was worth investigating to me. Even with my propensity towards potato-laden Spanish tortilla and soft potato bread, I had a hard time getting through barely ten pounds in a month. The fruit-lonely sweet potatoes fared slightly better but were off inside two months. So much for an extension on sweet potato chips (fries) without some pantry help.
But there’s a happy tuber ending. The fruit-enhanced boxes, thank my lucky potato stars, all performed like root cellar champions. The banana-partnered box was the first to show minor signs of sprouting at around three months but the banana itself made for a heck of a mess so I’d avoid them. The pears and apples both gave equal life to their box mates and here, six months later, I’ve just had the last baked potato of the lot. Firm and sprout free. Although the sheer age made the potato taste a bit more starchy than I’d like, it was perfectly usable and suffered no pantry wilt at all.
It’s worth noting from some of my other tests that you should keep your bulk onions (or anything from the allium family which includes garlic, chives, shallots, etc.), which were also on sale for the same price this week thanks to productive Maritime farmers, well away from the potato bins. It seems they produce ‘gases’ that speed up the decay of potatoes and sprout more easily themselves with potatoes nearby. What gases? I couldn’t nail that chemistry down. Everyone that talks about the topic leaves it vague but I’ll keep digging and update you if I find a more precise answer. I suspect it’s probably some of their sulphur-based compounds decaying but that’s just a guess. It almost certainly has to do with moisture exchange between the two as well. Onions in another dark spot, very dry, and in a single layer is your best bet. Mix them when it comes time for hash browns I say. With some cheese. Mmmm… melty cheese.
So there you go bulk potato buyers of the Maritimes and indeed all of Canada. Get those apples and pears into a decently ventilated cardboard box with your cheap taters if you want them to last more than a month in the closet. I’ll get my creamy dill and Gruyere gratin recipe up for you eventually so you’ll have something tasty to do with them.
