Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
VICTORIA GUTAVAS: Hi, back to our next segment. And here what I'm going to teach you is about
the potatoes. Now again in this particular recipe, what I've decided to do is go with
a smaller-size red potato, and the reason that I've done that are for several--there's
several reasons. One, that they're easier to cut up, and they are easier to cut up into
bite-size pieces which is what we want for this dish. The second reason is a red potato
versus a white potato. Red potatoes are actually softer, and they have their own distinct flavor
and taste. So when actually cooking this dish, you want to try and you want to use the red
potatoes. Now in actual peeling, I have this great little peeler that has a sharp end to
it and a nice double-blade. And what I'm going to do is go ahead and peel the potato very
carefully so that I don't take off my own fingers and skin with it, and when I get around
to the sides of the potato, for those of you that may be cooking for the first time for
a special someone in your life, gentlemen. When you're actually going into this dense
part of the potato, which we call them the eyes of the potato, this little handy gadget
at the end is going to help you dig that out, so it'll be easy for you to peel the rest
of the potato up. And as you can see, it takes a couple of nice strokes of the potato peeler
to do this evenly and nicely, and you don't want to take off a lot of the potato, just
get the red off. For those of you that are health oriented, what you may want to do is
leave the skins on. I mean, this dish was always done in our family by peeling them,
but I have tried it with the skins on and it tastes just the same. But if you are going
to leave the skins on, what I do recommend is that you get a good vegetable scrubber
and scrub those skins of all the potatoes. So once all the skin is off the potato, what
you're going to do is hold it down pretty firmly and slice through the middle. And then
once you sliced through the middle, put it flat down on your cutting board. This will
actually ground the potato and it won't be rolling around, so you have less chance of
cutting yourself. And then you'll cut it again in half and then cut those in half, so you've
actually quartered each half of your potato. What you can do if you want to is, as we've
done for this particular filming, is we cut up these potatoes in advance, and potatoes
will not get brown if you put them in water, lukewarm or cold water. And what we did with
the rest of these potatoes, we actually used eight small potatoes, and here we are, we've
got the rest of them cut up in those bite-size pieces, nice little triangles, and they're
all done the same way. So when dish is assembled, they're all going to be the same size, the
same shape and that's just going to add a little bit of continuity to your dish.