1.  Agree with Julie. McCain to the rescue for French fries.

2. Agree with Kay and Sharon.  The tiny potatoes are usually good.  The finishing with Mexican seasonings I think for most of us comes from Diana Kennedy, at least it does for me.  Problem is that unless you have the patience of Job they are no good for mashed, baked, pommes ana, pancakes, etc etc.

3.  Agree with Kathleen that the good ones make nice potato salad and OK pancakes.

4.  And Sharon’s right, I shouldn’t even be contemplating baking this kind of potato.  If you get a good one, though, they are OK as stuffed baked potatoes.

Sounds like – at least in part – the type of potato. A mealy potato – think a Russet Burbank – will (should!) bake well, and emerge dry and fluffy. A waxy potato – the Red Bliss being a classic of the type – will bake or boil ok, but wit…h more than a little handling or stirring will become gummy. It has to do with the structure of the starch in the different types of potato (similar thing is true with rice types).

5. Sharon again, confirming my suspicions about storage.

The other problem is storage: cold storage converts the longer chain starches to sugars, so the resulting cooked potato has a gummy texture and a sweetish (at least to me) flavor. You can leave them in a dry, darkish, well-ventilated room temperature area for a few days and then have a go. If cold storage is the problem, this should rectify it: the sugars will revert back to their starchier relatives. Plants in the Solanaceae family are also very sensitive to an array of mosaic and other viruses which can also cause development – and consequent texture and flavor – problems.

Problem is, even though I keep my potatoes in a covered basket (Oaxacan, so pretty, such lucky potatoes) in the pantry, they don’t seem to revert.

6. Agree with Kathleen and Sharon that it may be a soil or climate problem.

7. I remain puzzled about the economics of this.  Consumer power is not great in Mexico so the potatoes aren’t returned (can you even imagine trying that?) But you would think at least the big buyers or the big producers would give some thought to the problem.  But then again, the stores are filled at the moment with inedible, mushy California peaches, so perhaps not, at least not as long as there are suckers like me who will try and try again.

Frustration, frustration, frustration is my experience with Mexican potatoes.  Too bad in a country where you can usually count on excellent fruits and vegetables.

OK, I know that potatoes don’t have a long history in Mexico, becoming important only as a result of the Rockefeller program in the 1950s.  OK, I know that Mexican potatoes are white potatoes and thus I can’t expect them to bake well.

But why, oh why, do Mexican potatoes go just as gummy (chicloso) if you boil them or fry them?  I suspect it’s because they have been stored at too high or too low a temperature.

Some are OK.  You can often, but not always detect the decent potatoes because their skin feels silky whereas the bad ones, often not always, tend to feel rough.  As soon as you start peeling the difference is obvious.  The knife does not slide easily through the bad potatoes, the cut surface is slightly rough and slightly watery, sometimes there is brown mottling, and when you sniff it has a strong distinctive smell instead of the light, clean smell of the good ones.  If you cook them, they end up transparent yellowish or black, quite inedible.

And no, this is neither gringa taste nor gringa pickiness.  One friend complained that it didn’t matter whether you bought Mexican potatoes from a tianguis, a supermarket, or a permanent market.  Always the same.  Another said she had given up buying potatoes because throwing half away made it really expensive.  It was the same in Guanajuato as it is in Mexico City. I don’t remember this problem when we came to Mexico over a decade ago.  What has gone wrong?

Any potato experts out there?

[The British] want their fruit and veg to be the best quality, available year-round, British but in season, cheap but with growers paid fairly, and ideally produced without any use of pesticides or artificial production methods.

Hmm.  I’d like that too.

This according  to a consumer survey carried out for FPJ by England Marketing.  FBJ Fresh Info (UK), august 27, 2010 Full text at http://www.freshinfo.com/index.php?s=n&ss=fd&sid=52059 (need to register). Thanks to Dr. C.S. Prakash of http://www.AgBioWorld.org/

As a preliminary I would say that they would certainly have tried it.  If you look back at the past, everything that could be done to grains was: toasting, sprouting, soaking, boiling, adding alkali (and doubtless acids too), pounding, grinding, doing these things in diverse orders, fermenting the result, shaping the result.

Second preliminary.  People were very, very picky and knowledgeable about the result.  If you depend on grain (bread, tortillas, boiled rice, etc etc) for 80% of your calories you become a connoisseur of grain products.  We simply don’t match that knowledge.

Third preliminary.  Grinding and pounding sound simple but they were very sophisticated operations with dozens of variants depending on the species of grain, the variety of the species chosen, the age of the grain, the type of grindstone (dozens of shapes and materials of lateral grindstones alone) and the preliminary treatment of the grain before you started.

Fourth preliminary.  Our vocabulary is ridiculously restricted.  How many of us today can snap our fingers and explain the difference between meal and groats and grits and flour and grist and a whole complex vocabulary that varied from place to place and grain to grain. Just the word bread covers a world of products and that’s only the beginning.

Fifth preliminary.  This may all seem just too nerdy for words. But the fate of whole societies depended on how they ground.  Few things have had greater impact on the course of history.

Ken (his photo) tried soaking barley for a few days.

As Leni Sorensen and Adam Balic in the comments both point out, this will begin changing some of the starch to sugar, resulting in a sweeter result.   Here’s Leni’s description.

I have ground sprouted red wheat berries on my big Mexican matate – not the easiest – so I now resort to the food processor. Sprouted wheat with a two day tail makes a sweet sticky paste. I use it in my yeast bread but it also makes a great addition to flat breads and crackers. Yum!

Then Ken (his photo) pounded the barley in a large mortar for twenty minutes.

Ken’s description.

It was an odd red prairie barley I picked up at Corti Brothers in Sacramento, meant to be cooked like rice. So I have no idea how old, how far prepared or anything. They were not pearled like barley you buy for soup. More like a whole grain. And after pounding (just soaked, not cooked) it was a coarse dough. Which only really held together well after I added ground dry flour. SO maybe that’s why there’s not wet milling. You need dry flour too.

Ken didn’t photograph the final result but I suspect it was nothing like as finely divided as a ground grain dish would be.  And the hull (the tight seed coat) is not going to be broken into fine particles by pounding.  Shearing does a much better job than pounding at breaking up the seed coat and reducing the interior to tiny particles.

Here’s my tentative summary of the situation.

So Ken  pounded not sheared in your mortar. That is quicker and easier  than shearing because you can use the weight of arm plus pestle. But as the photo shows it does not produce flour just smashed… grains.

To get either smooth masa or a fine flour (not a very coarse meal) you have to shear. Shearing is almost impossible in a pestle and mortar if you want to produce flour in quantity because you are turning your wrist, tiring and not very forceful.

Maize nixtamalized can be ground to a smooth masa but only on a lateral grindstone, not a rotary one. You use the weight of the body.

Dry maize, wheat, barley etc can be ground to a smooth flour on a lateral (body weight at work, usually though not always) or a rotary grindstone (weight of the upper stone doing the work).

Wet wheat, barley etc (and I think wet, unnixtamalized maize) can be ground to a paste on a lateral grindstone but only with difficulty (thanks Leni).

Wet rice can be ground to a slurry (but not a paste) on a rotary grindstone (thanks Adam).  Pastes gum up rotary grindstones (which is why in Mexico there were two kinds of grinding, water mills for wheat and lateral grindstones for wet maize).

Wet or dry grains can be broken or flaked by pounding with a pestle and mortar.

____

A couple more thoughts.

1. Flour is pretty perishable which is why grains were stored whole, not as flour.  But wet pastes (masa) are much, much more perishable.  They don’t keep from one day to the next.  You have to have powerful reasons to want to grind wet.

2. Flour can be sifted through a cloth to remove all of part of the bran (the broken up seed coat).  This can’t be done with a paste (the coat of maize is rubbed off before grinding wet, having been broken up by the alkali used in nixtamalization).   Since people have always preferred finer, whiter breads, this was another advantage to flour.

I’ve often wondered at the Mexican four and five year-olds (or younger) who trot along beside their mothers for mile after mile.  It induces what I call the “first class passenger syndrome.”  No sooner are you upgraded to first class because of your miles than it’s all too easy to start feeling that the people in second class are just plain different. So it’s all too easy to imagine that these children are just inured to long walks.

This delightful song from the Tarahumara of northern Mexico puts that idea to rest.   A mother encourages her hungry, footsore child on the long journey home over the mountains.  First in Tarahumara, then in English. Evocative photos.

towi_simi_nararachi

Need Powerpoint and it takes a few seconds to load.

Thanks to an unknown teacher in the area who wanted it better known. Forwarded by Beatriz Ramírez Woolrich.

So why do people say you need wheat to make bread? This is about 80 percent barley, and the rest sourdough wheat starter. Rose nicely, though dense, and quite pungently sour. But this is SUCH luscious bread. Exactly what I was looking for.

Well surely people don’t say you need wheat to make bread.  All kinds of grains (rye, maize, oats, etc etc) were used to make bread, and it was stretched with peas, beans, potatoes, chestnuts, or, bark or clay if you were really pushed.  But if you wanted to rise a bit, then you need some wheat (or rye).  Which is precisely what you have here.

And here’s the weirdest part. I have no grain mill. Someday I want a rotary hand quern. Anyone know where to get one, has to be stone, please let me know. I never really wanted an electric flour mill – that’s the only reason I still don’t own one.

So I soaked the barley for a few days and hand ground the grains in my big stone mortar. No big deal. Not gritty in the least. I wonder why people in the past without mills didn’t do this. Much easier than dry grains. And of course with corn in MesoAmerica, this is exactly what they did. Why is there no wet milling for bread in the West??? I am perplexed.

Not exactly revolutionary you might think.  Well lots do.  I am just relishing the thought of responding to the flood of hostile comments.  I love controversy.

Nor is it a new idea of mine. Here’s a link to the original article A Plea for Culinary Modernism: Why We should Love Fast, New, Processed Food which appeared nine years ago!

Back story.  Darra Goldstein asked me to write something for the first issue of Gastronomica, the food journal for grownups that was then just a gleam in her eye.  And she included it in the lovely volume, The Gastronomica Reader published by the University of California Press which celebrated 10 years of the journal.  And from there it went to Utne Reader. And from there to the NYT.

That’s called legs.

Edit.

For those of you coming from SF Weekly Blogs, welcome. I hope you have a moment to look at the original article.  And perhaps even to browse the blog.

For those who would like to see the posts there, here’s the link to John Birdsall’s article, “We Evolved to Eat Processed Food. No, Really.” No really indeed. Rachel

End edit.

The last few days I’ve been corresponding with several people about how to use the internet to record the cuisines of the humble.

This site, Forgotten Recipies of the Venezuelan Andes strikes me as just a lovely example.  The collector and recorder, Gamal El Fakih Rodriguez, trained in the Hotel School of Mérida in Venezuela and is now Associate Director of the Institute of Hotel Management and Tourism in Quebec. The photographer, Jean-Luc Crucifix, lives in Venezuela.

They let the people speak for themselves, they neither editorialize nor do they promote.  And that allows us the space to reflect on the photos and recipes.

I´d begin with this song, the cook, sung by Doña Mercedes Muñoz de Rodríguez in April of 1978.  It´s a story of escape from the kitchen, where you have to get up at the crack of dawn, where the wood of the cooking fire won’t take, where your mama scolds you, to the arms of your lover who gives you what you need to eat and drink, nice clothes, and whose kisses taste like chocolate, glowing orange, like tomato.

Jean-Luc Crucifix

Here’s a recipe for bread, using a home made starter.

ANDEAN CREOLE BREAD

It is, together with the Arepas, one of most popular side dishes in the Andean mountains. Its recipe has evolved over the years, but we present it here in its most traditional way.

Ingredients

(For 50 rolls)

1 cup wheat bran

6 kilos of wheat flour

4 ounces of “yesteryear butter” (milk cow butter wrapped in Frailejon sheets)

¼ pound of loaf sugar

4 eggs

Lukewarm water

Salt to taste and a pinch of baking

Various spices (cloves, allspice, anise, etc.).

Prepare a yeast, formerly known as the “Talvina”: Place in wooden boxes, wheat bran, a little warm water and a drink called Papelon, (made with sugar cane) Cover and let stand for three days until it ferments and beyond.

Once you get the ‘Talvina’ add eggs, butter (which can substitute lard), spices and salt. Stir a bit and add the flour and baking soda.

Mix well to form a dough that pulls away from the sides of a pan. Place on a floured plate and knead for about 10 minutes. Divide the dough in half, cover with a cloth and let stand for about 20 minutes until it swells.

Preheat the oven preferably with branches of Cinar (wild tree that grows in cold and wet areas) until the embers glow bright red. At this point, sweep the oven with a broom and thoroughly clean it.

Once the bread has puffed, spread on buttered plate and bake for about 45 minutes.

In some areas it was customary to also add oat and milk which enriched the taste of bread.

Nowadays we can use baker’s yeast instead of “Talvina”, which obviously simplifies many things. In this case it is however necessary to add grated Papelon, which taste is a hallmark of our Andean Bread.

Jean-Luc Crucifix

And here’s a recipe for a probably more everyday dish.

PLANTAIN BANANAS SOUP

Ingredients

(8-10 people)

2 green plantains

1 cup potato

1 cup pieces of arricaria

1 cup cassava

1 cup pumpkin

¼ fat oxen (leftovers)

Pork fat and salt.

Peel, wash and finely chop all ingredients, fry in lard and add cold water. Simmer until all’m cooked. Add salt and serve at the last minute.

Thanks so much to my friend and colleague, María Luisa Lares Ríos for putting me on to this.  The book is available in Spanish, French and English.  You can buy it in bookstores in Montreal and Toronto or by mail order.  I can’t wait for my copy.

Pain shot through my knees as I attempted to get up from the floor. My legs wobbled. The backs of my knees felt slick with sweat, and my T-shirt was damp. I shuffled the four paces to the jar of agua like an arthritic old woman. A blister was starting to form on my left palm. Why was I doing this to myself?

Of course, as you will see when you read her full account, she was using the physical motion of grinding to heat the metate.  Remember your physics lessons.  Mechanical work as force exerted over a distance.  That´s what Lesley was up to.  Maybe physics classes would be more immediate if students had to force the stone over the grindstone time and again to create heat.   It would have been easier, though not a whole lot easier, if the metate were heated. And of course it would have been hotter.

Anyway compare Lesley’s reality with this oh-so-cool gentleman, not a suspicion of sweat on his brow, not a hint of the weight of the body forcing that stone along.

Finally in a tweet, Lesley said she would never look at dark chocolate the same way again.  Well, even Lesley’s final puddle of chocolate was a long, long way from the dark chocolate so popular now.  That kind of smoothness can never be created with a grindstone.  It took the Industrial Revolution to produce that.   Another post coming soon on that.

Then Uma Satyavolu sent these memories of pootarekulu, as these sheets are called.  Not so much on how they are made because that’s a professional job.  More on how they are layered with ghee and powdered sugar for events at the time of weddings and of imminent birth.   Thanks, Uma, for such fascinating background.  I specially love the idea of steel drums full of these paper thin sheets.

Update.  Uma has asked me to post this update.

Rachel:

I’ve made a few small but significant changes! Could you please, please post this instead of the other version?

Also, I’ve often wondered about the similarity between Ethiopean/Eritrean injera and appam/attu/dosa: fermented batter cooked on a griddle and eaten with stew/sauce. So the Eritrean rice-pastry connection is interesting. But the odd thing is that pootarekulu are fairly specific as a culinary and culturalphenomenon; they are not even that well-known in the next district over. Or if they are, they are only so as an idiosyncratic taste.  It would have to be a fairly isolated trade-route for such a selective and isolated transfer of technology.

Regards,

Uma

My parents were both from the Godavari districts (East and West). So although I grew up in Hyderabad (the Big City which is in the Telangana region of the state), and always considered myself not very Andhra,  it’s been one of those things that is quintessentially “Home.”

Pootarekulu are literally, “smeared sheets” because they are made by smearing rice paste on hot surfaces (as the video you posted shows) and are bought as rice sheets and assembled at home.

They are popular throughout the Godavari region, but most prized in “Konaseema”-the Corner island part of East Godavari. When my mother used to call in the vendor who cried ‘pootarekulu” in the outskirts of Hyderabad, it was always a treat.

I remember the time my mother said, “Oh, please, we are from the Godavari (region),” (meaning, you shouldn’t try to quote high prices, as we know what they usually cost). The man selling the sheets from the woven basket (about 3 feet in circumference) which he transported on the back of a bicycle said: “Of course, you’re from the Godavari; if you weren’t, you’d be asking me if they were sheets/leaves to hang from the doorways!”

You buy the sheets from people who make them-they are, as far as I know, never made at home in normal households–by the hundred. They look like translucent foolscap paper sheets, and the women of the household assemble them for special occasions. This is especially true of the bride’s going away after the wedding, and for seemantam (baby shower-like ceremonies usually held in the seventh month of pregnancy).

Pootarekulu (along with chalimidi, ariselu, and sunni-undalu) are traditional sweets that are sent with the bride to the in-laws when she leaves her home after the wedding.  Huge amounts (big steel-drums full of them) arrive at the new in-laws’ home. They then  send the sweets round to friends, neighbours, and relatives to announce that their new daughter-in-law has arrived.  Pootarekulu are usually eaten as a tiffin/tiffen (snack)-with afternoon coffee or tea.

I used the phyllo dough analogy because, essentially, it is assembled like baklava: lay down a sheet, dampen with a clean, slightly wet cloth, brush liberally with molten ghee (clarified butter), and sprinkle liberally and evenly with powdered sugar. Then lay another sheet on top, and repeat. The process is tricky for a beginner, because if the towel is too wet, the sheet turns to starch and sticks to the towel.

Unlike baklava, after six or seven layers, it is folded into a neat packet using more ghee and wet-cloth application to keep it all moist and compact. The ghee then solidifies with the powdered sugar, and gives it a very disticntive taste and mouth-feel.

Its flavour is entirely dependent upon the quality (and, to be fair, quantity) of ghee. Without enough ghee, it can be papery and flaky, and that’s one thing good pootarekulu cannot be.

I’ve lived away from India for twenty years now, and the last time I went to Andhra Pradesh, it was being sold in sweets shops and even some supermarkets, which was not the case when I left, so that’s a good thing, I think.
I could go on on about it because it is bound up with my nostalgia  for the Godavari country, which is very fertile, and green with paddy fields and coconut trees and canals and temples. So I will refrain.

Thanks for the pleasure of thinking about pootarekulu: I miss them more as time passes. Sadly my American-born, non-Andhra, non-Indian husband did not take to the pootarekulu as well as he did to most other things Andhra, including Gongura, a relative of the hemp-leaf, and also an iconically Andhra food.

More food for thought. Another round up soon.  And many thanks, Uma.