One Potato, Two Potato, Twenty Potato

Whole Foods. I love this term, and especially what it means. On The Food Show (airs weekdays 2-4pm on 990 WGSO) I often speak about American food and its perversion from real food. So I was delighted when my daughter told me about her garden, which is now in its second season. She and her boyfriend grow different crops, but together there is some serious output.

She has tomatoes of all varieties, peas, cucumbers, squash, zucchini, eggplant, bell peppers, poblanos, banana peppers, carrots, several lettuce varieties, and flowers. Her boyfriend has corn, potatoes, watermelon, and okra.

And here is where fantasy and reality clash. Think about having all that bounty of fresh produce available just for you! The reality is that all of that fresh produce is available just for you. Who can eat that much? If it was staggered out the reality wouldn’t be so stressful, but harvest time is a small window, so gorging is a necessity, unfortunately.

Of all of this bounty, I was most interested in potatoes. Paul Prudhomme once said that there is nothing quite like the taste of potatoes right out of the garden. And James Beard remarked that a perfectly cooked potato needs no butter or salt. Huh?? I had to see about this.

On the day of the first potato harvest, she brought over a small pile of red potatoes, white potatoes, and Yukon Gold potatoes. I scrubbed them well because they were warm with dirt from the garden. After they were clean I did what I think is the best way to cook a potato - baked. They were indeed delicious with just butter and salt. Blasphemous as it sounds, I still don’t trust James Beard’s advice.

I made a brisket hash for breakfast based on the delicious model Pete Kusiw did at the sadly defunct Lakehouse. His was corned beef but brisket worked well too. He dices the potatoes as only a French chef would, in very tiny cubes. Mine weren’t as tiny or as uniform. I liked it okay but not nearly as well as Pete’s.

Then I remembered the parsley potatoes from the grade school cafeterias of my youth. These were miserable, with canned potatoes and margarine, sprinkled with dried parsley. There was something appealing about parsley potatoes, even back then. I decided to update the simple dish using whole foods. The potatoes were fresh from the garden and the margarine was real butter and the parsley coarsely chopped. These were as pretty as they were tasty, and the ingredients are the only bridge between the cafeteria ones that inspired this experiment and the garden-fresh ones from this exercise. 

I want to explore a lot more as new potatoes come from the garden, but all these potato projects made me think about great potato dishes around town. 

Here are some favorites, in order of goodness:

1. The Lyonnaise Potatoes at Chophouse.

The Lyonnaise potatoes of their heyday in the mid-Twentieth century had a lot of onions and peppers to combine with the potatoes, creating a pretty sensational taste. The original dish was made with sliced potatoes but I never saw that anywhere in restaurants. I don’t know why it is so hard to find this version of potatoes now. At the Chophouse, these come to the table as a sort of a loaf of individual potato pieces held together by butter and a thick crust from a cast iron skillet. And magic. Magic is how they taste, but what makes these special is the texture. The contrast between the crispy, brown crust from searing and the buttery soft potato inside is downright exciting.

2. The basic shoestring fries at Crescent City Steakhouse. 

These simple fried potatoes are straight out of the 1950s, when your mom lovingly cut potatoes by hand and simply fried them. They are crispy and greaseless and golden brown, with soft potato in the middle. Perfection.

3. The Au Gratin Potatoes at Keith Young’s Steakhouse.

These have no peer. They are bubbling over with cheese and cream and of course butter when they arrive at your table. They come in a large ramekin of ¼ “ thick slices that remind me of my mom’s scalloped potatoes, but these are way better.

4. The housemade potato chips at Keith Young’s.

Keith’s also does the best housemade chips, served at Happy Hour with a small crock of their delicious housemade Bleu Cheese dressing. These are crisp and greaseless with a nice salt level, and it is shocking how much of this huge pile is consumed. They’re that good.

5. Brasa Churrasqueria’s Al Gratin potatoes.

Another steakhouse, this one a Latin Steakhouse, with another cheesy potato dish deserves a mention on this list. Here is a truly really decadent version of a nearly ubiquitous dish featuring Gruyere, white cheddar, and chives.  I even peeled the burnt cheese rim from the dish before letting them take it off the table.

6. Arnaud’s Soufflé Potatoes.

Any list in New Orleans must include some of the iconic classics. Though Antoine’s brought us soufflé potatoes, (and they are very good,) the very best version of this dish is at Arnaud’s, where the presentation is special and the potatoes themselves are exactly as they should be: a crispy shell on the outside and hollow inside. The Bearnaise Sauce is best here too. Second place goes to Galatoire’s.

7. Brabant potatoes at Galatoire’s.

Here are the best version of our Brabant potatoes. They are small, uniform cubes of fried potatoes, crispy on the outside and soft inside. These Brabants are drizzled with garlic butter.

8. The loaded baked potato at Port of Call. 

This fabled New Orleans joint offers the irresistible combo of the fantastic burger, with an equally fantastic baked potato. The potato is huge with crispy skin, and it is fluffy on the inside. The cheese and bacon and onion and sour cream make it a wonderful mouthful of contrasting tastes and textures.

9. The potato salad at Pat’s Rest-A-While. 

Mea Culpa for daring to put a lowly potato salad on this list, but the potato salad at Pat’s Rest-a-While on the Mandeville lakefront deserves inclusion. I tell anyone who will listen not to miss this one, despite the fact that it is a drive from the Southshore. Tom has always said that Pat Gallagher makes lusty food, a description more apt than anything I have heard about anyone. Pat Gallagher cares not a whit about anything but how something will taste to you. He is unabashed in his use of butter, and the same is true of sour cream. The loaded baked potato salad at Rest-A-While is salty and creamy with bits of everything you’d find on a loaded baked potato. But mostly it is rich. And oh, so delicious.

10. Hashbrowns at Camellia Grill.

The last entry on this list maybe doesn’t belong in the same league as the loftier serious potato dishes at nice steakhouses, but I’m doing it anyway. The hashbrowns at Camellia Grill are right out of the mid-twentieth century and are probably greased with margarine because that’s what they did in that day, but I love them. It is almost impossible to find these frozen potato shreds hashbrowns anywhere now, replaced by boring cubes of potatoes fried with a Creole seasoning dusting. When these little shreds are done properly, I just love them. It’s enough of a reason to go back to Camellia Grill, along with so many others.

11. Potatas Bravas at Brasa.

What can I say? Steakhouses offer incomparably delicious potato accompaniments to their steaks. This Latin steakhouse has the Latin version. Fried irregular chunks of potatoes with fried herbs and an exquisitely delicious smoked paprika aioli dipping sauce.

12. Mosca’s roasted potatoes.

These weird blobs of potato are inexplicably interesting, maybe because they remind me of something my mom might have made: irregular large chunks of potatoes with garlic and a layer of grease. The exterior is firm and almost crispy, and the interior fluffy. Oddly appealing. To me, anyway.

Whether you eat potatoes you grow or cook them at home, or eat them in any kind of restaurant, potatoes are always a delight. Push aside the guilt and savor the goodness.