KEY POINTS:
It's the International Year of the Potato! Can you believe the luck of it? Finally, someone has understood that potatoes are just as important as women, children, men, floods, poverty, wealth and fish.
The Incas worshipped potato spirits and measured time by how long it took to cook
a potato. Where have those colourful days gone? Maybe now the dumb jokes will stop - Why did the potato cross the road? He saw a fork up ahead. What do you call a stolen kumara? A hot potato.
The diet fascists would have us believe spuds are 100 per cent sugar and to eat one is the same thing as eating a handful of lollies. For the record, potatoes are composed of 70 to 80 per cent water, 10 to 20 per cent starch and 10 per cent sugar, mineral and protein. In terms of calories, eating a spud is no different from eating an apple - how can that be bad for you?
Potatoes are now so glamorous, people write theses about them. Take Graham Harris, rest his soul, who chose the history of Maori potato cultivation as the subject for his Master of Philosophy in ethnobotany. Harris was particularly interested in the connection between the Maori spiritual attachment to land and their growing of crops, employment, nutrition, gift giving and the transfer of knowledge between the generations.
Only 15 years ago, most people knew nothing about the delicious Maori potato - except, of course, Maori who had always grown it in their gardens. In a world degraded by fast life, fast foods and disappearing agricultural traditions, a good spud, simply steamed, is like edible gold.
Purple urenika are my favourites, and it is a particularly bizarre experience to eat purple food because blue is associated with poison. The colour comes from the same powerful antioxidant that gives blueberries their colour.
Also, you don't expect it to taste like a potato, but it actually tastes like the spuds you think you remember from your childhood - buttery and nutty.
Once tasted, Maori potatoes are never forgotten, and the reason they are so good is they have never been commercially cultivated or modified in any way.
These superior-tasting and disease-resistant potatoes probably came to New Zealand with the first European ships, but many Maori believe their ancestors had been cultivating potatoes, along with kumara, as long as 1000 years ago.
Maori say Peruvian whalers brought them, which is why they call them peruperu.
The interesting thing is, that centuries ago, all potatoes looked like this - small, almost black, rather ugly and sometimes taking a very long time to cook.
Maori stored their potatoes in pits in the ground. Layers of ponga fronds were placed among the potatoes, the spores from the ferns keeping pests and disease away. Imagine how fabulous they must have tasted, coming up from the hangi pits!
Urenika are purple all the way through so, to best preserve the colour, steam or bake them. Otherwise, they are beautiful mashed, in salads with red peppers, or as chips and hash-browns.
OVEN-BAKED URENIKA CHIPS
1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp hot smoked paprika
juice of 1/2 lime (1 tbsp)
600g purple potatoes
1 heaped tbsp finely chopped chives
1. Preheat oven to 250C. Mix oil, salt, paprika and lime juice in large bowl.
2. Thinly slice potatoes on a plastic board which is easy to clean as the colour will stain a bit. Pat slices with kitchen paper then toss in the oil mixture to coat.
3. Lay potatoes out on a large baking sheet. Bake until they are crisp - about 25 minutes. (You could also do this on the barbecue.)
To serve: Toss in chives and eat dipped in aioli.
- Detours, HoS