Recipe

Golden ’Taties

Gwangju News

By Julian Warmington

Introduction

The humble potato is the global village’s most unassuming super food. Buried just below the surface of the soil as they grow, the French call them “apples of earth,” and as with apples, it is basically impossible to eat too many. Despite developing within the dirt, potatoes are amazingly healthy – until, that is, they are deep fried and covered in greasy cheese and awfully oily butter. 

Andrew “Spud Fit” Taylor was obese and clinically depressed until he decided to eat nothing but potatoes and sweet potatoes for the year of 2016. He recorded and presented his meals on YouTube from his home in Australia. By the end of the year, he had lost 53 kilograms (117 pounds), his doctor had taken him off his depression meds. Perhaps even more surprisingly, despite never adding cheese or butter, he also never got sick of eating the same thing for every meal, every day: He still loved eating potatoes! 

Inspired by Aussie Andrew’s awesome example, I wondered: How can potatoes best be cooked that preserves both their flavor and nutritional value? I found baking potatoes best, using just a few simple, healthy herbs and spices to bring out their fullest flavor.

Ingredients

  • Potatoes and/or sweet potatoes
  • Black pepper (freshly ground if possible)
  • Turmeric
  • Thyme
  • Red pepper powder, or chilli powder

Instructions

  1. Turn on your oven to 180 degrees Celsius to warm up. 
  2. Prepare the potatoes by cleaning as much as possible and then peeling them as little as possible. Cut into your favorite shapes: halves, quarters, wedges, or smaller.
  3. Place your prepared potatoes in a plastic bread bag, a plastic container with a lid, or even a pot with a lid. Sprinkle the other ingredients over the top sparingly, then close the plastic bag or put the lid on your container and shake around to mix up the ingredients evenly. 
  4. If your oven tray is not non-stick, put a small amount of cooking oil in the center of it. It need only be about the size of a coin. Use the straight edge of a piece of potato to spread out the oil to the edges of the tray. Then put the potatoes in the tray.
  5. Cook for about 45 minutes or less, turning the potatoes over or shaking the tray to turn them around every ten or 15 minutes.
  6. Serve with cracked pepper mustard, just a little tomato sauce (or what those funny folks from the USA call “ketchup”), or a sprinkle of nutritional yeast over the top. 

Hints

  • To test whether the pieces of potato are cooked yet, stab them in the middle with a knife and lift straight up off the tray. If they slide down your knife back onto the tray, they are cooked properly. If they stay stuck on the end of your knife, they need a little longer.
  • For greater variety, include other vegetables such as carrots, pumpkin, or even cauliflower. 
  • The flavour comes mostly from the black pepper and thyme. It is the combination of the black pepper and turmeric that gives this recipe its other major health benefit alongside the nutrition of the potato: black pepper and turmeric together provide the best anti-inflammatory effect known to modern science.
  • It will take experimenting to find the right amounts of the extra ingredients to best suit your preferred taste. The first time you try this recipe, err on the side of caution and use less, especially of the turmeric. Potatoes do have their own creamy flavour anyway, which simply baking helps highlight.

The Author

Julian Warmington taught for twenty years at the university level in South Korea, half of which he spent in Gwangju. His favourite movies are Cowspiracy: The sustainability secret (2014) and What the Health?! (2017), his favourite recipe book is Thrive (2007), by Brendan Brazier, and, he misses all the veggies of downtown Gwangju’s peagbun and beunshik restaurants.