What to Eat: Food that’s good for your health, pocket and plate. Joanna Blythman
Supermarket cosmetic specifications compound the insult. Thanks to them, our larger-than-life peppers might as well be cloned as they share identikit proportions and gleam like fake plastic vegetables.
The whole pepper category is ripe for innovation. The pity is that there are many more interesting sweet pepper varieties that could be cultivated and which are still widely grown in southern and eastern Europe and the Middle East. Seeds for a more biodiverse, and genuinely varied, range of peppers are available for home-growing. If you have access to peppers from a domestic greenhouse, allotment or garden, then you may get a flavour of them.
Glasshouse cultivation raises a number of environmental issues (see TOMATOES/Are tomatoes a green choice?).
Where and when should I buy peppers?
Imported peppers, usually Dutch or Spanish, are available all year round. English peppers come on to the market from March until October.
AN APOLOGY FOR A PEPPER?
Peppers were an alien vegetable (or more correctly, fruit) until the 1960s and 1970s when they earned the patronage of distinguished cookery writers such as Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson, who testified to how delightful they could be when consumed on their home turf. By the 1980s, our sweet pepper market had been more or less sewn up by the Dutch horticultural industry, which kept us supplied with a never-ending supply of the glasshouse-grown sort. Neither Spanish nor English-grown pepper growers have ever really challenged its supremacy. Britain’s meek acceptance of what southern countries might see as an apology for a pepper may have something to do with the fact that our experience of eating the sun-grown, hot-country sort was limited to foreign holidays, so we were less aware of how different, and how much more rewarding such peppers might be.
The sheer dogged reliability of unseasonal hothouse peppers has won them a near invincible place in our vegetable repertoire. At any point in time, while wholesale markets and suppliers will have fluctuating stocks of other vegetables, they will always be able to supply peppers. ‘Mediterranean vegetables’, showcasing the pepper, have become a menu cliché. Ratatouille, roasted peppers and red pepper soup have become thoroughly embedded in Britain’s vegetable lexicon.
Will peppers break the bank?
Peppers are a commodity glasshouse crop, but this doesn’t stop supermarkets charging unjustifiably high prices for them. As a general rule, peppers are cheaper in greengrocers and from market stalls. Don’t be put off by peppers that look a little soft and wrinkled, instead snap them up at bargain prices. They will taste better than their smooth, still waterlogged, more expensive equivalent. Don’t turn up your nose at discounted peppers that are soft or rotten in parts. Peppers are one vegetable where you can happily cut out the bad bit without any off flavours tainting the rest.
Potatoes
Potatoes are a bit like a dependable old friend. They are always there for you. Whether it’s a plate of home-made chips, an oozing gratin or a buttery potato purée, potatoes offer solace and comfort. You can snuggle up with them like a warm quilt. Too often used in a routine way as a ubiquitous, stodgy sidekick to the main act, potatoes have patrician potential and can rise to the special occasion when cooked thoughtfully and creatively.
For cooks, the crucial distinction in potato type is between waxy (firm flesh, good for salads) and floury (more granular, good for roasting and mash), although some varieties (Desiree, Wilja, Romano) fall between these two categories. The mainstream potato industry grades potatoes on a scale from one (waxy) to nine (floury), but most commercial effort goes into developing and marketing a few ‘all-purpose’ varieties.
The flavour and texture of potatoes come down to a combination of the variety grown and the growing method, but even the best grower can’t make duff varieties taste of much. Our shelves are loaded with potatoes that look the part, but disappoint on the flavour and texture front. Under the influence of supermarkets, plant breeders have developed potatoes for yield, processing quality and appearance. They must be free from deep-set ‘eyes’, all similarly shaped, and have no knobbly bits, which instantly knocks out many of our distinguished traditional varieties. Eating quality has barely entered the brief. Old varieties (see Potatoes with a sense of place), prized for their flavour, their flesh of various colours and their distinctive textures, have lost out to anonymous-tasting, white-fleshed modern varieties, such as Maris Piper, Santé, Estima, Cara, Rocket and Nadine, that produce high yields when given lots of water and chemical fertilizers.
If you want real spuds, not duds, then seek out varieties with character and personality. Among the most readily available, the best-tasting waxy varieties include Charlotte, Nicola, Jersey Royal, Pink Fir Apple, Yukon Gold and La Ratte; the best-tasting floury varieties include Golden Wonder, Marfona, King Edward, Duke of York, Valor, Cosmos and Kerr’s Pinks.
Things to do with potatoes
• Roast unpeeled potato wedges in olive oil and generously dust just before serving with smoked paprika and sea salt.
• Vary the classic gratin Dauphinois (thin slices of floury potatoes baked with cream, nutmeg and garlic) by substituting turnip, Jerusalem artichoke, celeriac or parsnip for half the potatoes.
• Greek skordalia – smooth potato, garlic and olive oil purée – served warm makes an unusual dip to serve with crudités.
• A couple of finely chopped anchovies turns a basic, creamy gratin into that full-bodied Scandinavian dish, Janssen’s temptation.
• For a cheap, but interesting starter, purée potatoes with olive oil and a little poached salt cod to make a French brandade. Serve with rustic toast brushed with olive oil.
• Thinly sliced potatoes and onions baked with stock – pommes Anna – make a lighter gratin.
• Home-made potato gnocchi beat the ready-made vacuum-packed sort hands down.
• Instead of the usual mayonnaise approach, make a more Germanic potato salad by dressing still-warm waxy potatoes with oil, wine or cider vinegar and lots of smooth mustard, then add fresh dill and chopped gherkins. Serve with crisp lardons of bacon on top, or with ham or smoked meats.
• Grate par-boiled waxy potatoes, season well with sea salt and pepper and shallow fry in thin, flat piles to make crunchy Swiss rosti.
Are potatoes good for me?
Potatoes are best thought of as a starchy carbohydrate food, an alternative to rice or pasta, rather than as a vegetable. Potatoes do contain some vitamin C, which supports the immune system, and this makes them nutritionally preferable to other popular starchy foods like couscous, pasta and white rice. Vitamin C levels are higher in new potatoes (the thin-skinned sort) than in older potatoes (the thicker-skinned sort). They also contain useful amounts of vitamin B6, which is necessary for metabolizing the amino acids in protein and the formation of red blood cells; vitamin B1, which is needed for healing and the smooth running of the nervous system; iron, which helps prevent anaemia; and folate, which helps prevent birth defects.
Like other starchy foods, potatoes do release sugar rather rapidly into the blood and this can encourage a surge in the fat storage hormone, insulin, which encourages the body to lay down fat. Different types of potatoes affect insulin in different ways. New potatoes raise your blood sugar level less than older, maincrop potatoes. Older maincrop potatoes are not great for people who want to lose weight, despite all those diet sheets that seek to persuade us that a baked potato is the slimmer’s friend. That said, if you eat potatoes along with foods that contain protein and fat, like meat, fish and eggs, this significantly slows down the release of sugar into the bloodstream.
In the past there have been concerns about residues of pesticides in potatoes, mainly in new potatoes. In recent years, the situation seems to have improved with around two-thirds of potatoes sampled in government tests coming up residue-free. More progressive conventional growers use ethylene gas to protect the potatoes in cold storage, rather than spraying them with post-harvest chemicals. You can reduce your exposure to chemical residues by choosing organic potatoes. One pesticide can be used in organic potato growing, but only in extremely restricted circumstances.
How are potatoes