The dirty truth about your muddy spuds
As Tesco sells potatoes with soil on for the first time in decades, Stephen Harris reveals the benefits
Tom and Barbara Good were seen as amiable cranks, not the future
It feels like we have gone full circle. Back in the Seventies, farming methods made it possible to rinse the worst of the mud off our potatoes before they hit the supermarket shelves. For the hard-pressed home cook, it was a godsend. No more hard scrubbing with a brush under cold water before you start the peeling.
But this week, Tesco announced that it will be selling muddy spuds again. And it’s a good job, too.
Fifty years ago, when fashions seemed to change quickly, you could look into the future and be sure that it didn’t include muddy potatoes. Certainly, there were none in the most futuristic film of the era, 2001: A
Space Odyssey. In fact, there was barely any “food” in the meals at all.
We thought that, one day, we would be driving around in hover cars and taking different flavoured pills that replicated the taste of an entire roast dinner. We even had adverts where aliens tried to understand human beings through their use of the potato. “They boil them for 20 minutes, and then smash them all to bits!” announced the Dalek-voiced creature in the Smash ads, before all of his friends burst into uncontrollable metallic laughter.
This, of course, was an advert for what looked like the future of the humble tuber; to be desiccated and dried into a powder and reconstituted by hot water, or milk if you were posh.
If this was the general direction everything was going in, there was no place for mud on your supermarket spud.
There was a counter narrative, from sitcom characters such as Tom and Barbara Good from The Good Life, who gave up the rat race to live off the land. Back then, they were seen as amiable cranks or British eccentrics, and certainly not the future. Or were they?
In the Eighties and Nineties came the rise of kitchen convenience, thanks to microwaves and ready meals. Potatoes helpfully got themselves ready for this brave new world by arriving in our homes already scrubbed clean and shrinkwrapped in plastic.
In the smartest supermarkets, you could even buy them peeled and ready for the pot.
This was, I’m sure, a blessing for some who didn’t want to spend time washing the mud off and then wiping down a dirty sink, but it meant that we lost touch with the land a bit more. Many people in cities had no understanding of the countryside and certainly didn’t want part of it clogging up their drains.
As times look to be changing again, no retailer wants to be seen wrapping things in plastic and contributing to one of the modern world’s big problems. We no longer appear to look to the future as some ultra-clean space age, but have realised that life might be a little better with a bit of dirt on our potatoes after all.
And there is another good reason for leaving some mud on our spuds – it extends their shelf life. We should have known that potatoes don’t like the sunlight, as they are often stored in mounds of peat to keep them usable. They like the dark, they don’t like the cold of the fridge and need some air circulation. In fact, what they like most are those heavy paper sacks in which they were traditionally sold in the supermarket, soil and all.
Mud helps with storage, stopping them sprouting eyes – and so we are back to where we started, with potatoes caked in the stuff.
By chance, I spent Monday morning testing recipes for baked potatoes. The British chef Clare Smyth was recently awarded three stars by the Michelin Guide for her restaurant Core in Notting Hill, and one of her signature dishes is a very refined baked potato. She cooks it sous vide (under pressure) at about 83C (181F) for several hours, before topping it with trout and herring roes, sorrel and a seaweed beurre blanc.
I have eaten it, and it is a thing of beauty. But if you had told someone
There is another good reason for leaving mud on them: it helps extend the shelf life
back in the Seventies that a three-star restaurant – historically, the home of luxury ingredients such as truffles, lobster and caviar – would have a baked potato as its signature dish, they would have thought it unlikely. But the humble spud has been elevated to food’s highest level.
It is a sign of the times that such simple ingredients are being celebrated as they should.
After all, Ferran Adrià, of the famous El Bulli restaurant in northern Catalonia, once said that he would rather eat a great sardine than a poor lobster.
There is just one thing that hasn’t been mentioned in the great dirty spud revival, and it is this: do they taste any better for being kept caked in mud?
It seems that the answer is undoubtedly yes. Some chefs are even experimenting with baking potatoes in the very earth they are grown in, to improve the flavour.
And that is the best reason for keeping the mud on them that I can think of.
Stephen Harris is the chef and owner of The Sportsman in Seasalter, Kent (thesportsmanseasalter.co.uk)