Purple Potatoes?

I recently bought a small bag of mixed potatoes marketed by Green Giant. It contained Klondike Gold, Rose, and Purple potatoes. As it turns out they have just begun marketing that gourmet medley bag this year. The purple potatoes were completely new to me.

There are several varieties of potato on the market with purple flesh. All of them originated in South America, and are grown only as a specialty potato. The state of Washington, long a potato stronghold, has begun growing some in the Skagit Valley. Most are marketed when they are small, officially labeled size A- baby potatoes.

Very little information is available about the different varieties with blue or purple flesh. Some names you may encounter are Russian Blue, Klondike Purple, All Blue, CO 94165, and Purple Peruvian. Several others: Blue Pride, Caribe, and Purple Chief have purple skin, but white flesh.

What can you do with purple potatoes? Anything you would do with white potatoes, of course. But some varieties might be better than others for certain dishes.

For my first experience with them, I simply boiled them and ate them plain with butter, salt and pepper. I wanted to see what they tasted like all alone. These are the Klondike Purple variety. In the first picture you can see the raw purple potato whole and cut, flanked by Klondike Gold ones.

I cooked them all together and discovered that the purple ones cooked just a little bit faster. When the gold ones were just right, the purple ones were a little bit mushy. You can actually sense that visually in the second picture. Note that the water looks a bit gray, but it did not bleed the color into the gold potato. And the purple color of the flesh faded, but did remain purple.

The taste was, well... like a potato. I'm not sure what I expected, but these are definitely for color interest as far as I can tell, and not for any specific tweaking of the taste. One food blog described it as "assertive and earthy." I think they are trying to convince me.

A search for recipes turned up several, but they were all simply potato recipes... "fork mashed," "potato salad," "marinated," cooked and served with butter. These are all things people have done for decades with the honored fruit of the earth. OK, so we can do this!

The ones that I bought were on the discount veggie table, which made me willing to pay the asking price. There would have to be some compelling special occasion that I thought purple potatoes would be a perfect addition or complement to some dish to buy them at full price.

I checked out some garden catalogs and blue potatoes are being listed for this season, but seem to also be marked as unavailable.

Gree Giant Klondike Medley

Specialty potato chart from healthypotato.com