The Secret Superfood of Thanksgiving

yeah, potatoes are like a top 5 staple crop globally. This is just an intentionally provocative framing for a throw-away article.

Irish-ancestry mom made potato salad in the summer time: boiled potato chunks, red onions, celery, boiled egg, sour cream, mayonnaise, and red wine vinegar.

Complete nonsense.

Congrats!

Potatoes (lightly processed like boiled, preferably) have a high satiety index.

Potatoes, brown rice, fish, and oatmeal are good stuff. Add spices to keep them interesting. Variety is the ... ;)

They’re not bad, it just depends on how much you process them. Oven baked fries for instance, are not far removed from normal oven roasted potatoes. Par boiling and then deep frying them in fats will release more nutrients than you would get from a normal baker. Slicing paper thin and perfectly frying is an industrial process that most people can’t replicate at home.

I honestly think home cooked potatoes are going to be perfectly fine in most ways.

Author explains some anti patterns with too much fat, so I'd guess baked or boiled with a dallop of butter or oil and little salt is a good approach.

You want to cook them at low enough heat to avoid forming any acrylamide.

Boiled new potatoes. Use 150-200 g per person. Place in a saucepan, and pour just-boiled water on top to well cover them. (I always tip a bit of salt in, but I think it's just superstition on my part.) Apply max heat with your gas hob to bring back to a boil, then put a lid on, and simmer on min heat for 20-25 minutes.

Test for doneness by eye (if the skin has broken, they're probably done - possibly even slightly overdone, but it won't be a huge problem) and fork (when done, the fork will easily go in, with consistent minimal resistance, but actually they're typically ok to eat after 25 minutes even if they don't quite pass the fork test).

Serve immediately. Or allow to cool and eat later. Or then put in the fridge once cooled and eat cold even later. But whatever you do, don't add anything else (salt, butter, other seasoning, etc.) until you've eaten at least one without.

Boil em, mash em, stick em in a stew?

Any way that doesn't involve a boatload of oils is fine, I'm sure.

One of the things I'm surprised they didn't mention is cooling. Cooling converts the starch in rice, potatoes, and pasta into resistant starch (and it stays resistant when you reheat it because nobody really likes eating cold potatoes). Starch normally gets processed by the small intestine into glucose but resistant starch is digested in the large intestine, so glucose levels don't spike. There are a number of other benefits described in the articles below:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26693746/

https://hopkinsdiabetesinfo.org/what-is-resistant-starch/