Flookburgh farm praised by Hairy Bikers for potato quality

On their Agony Uncles podcast, Dave Myers and Si King responded to a listener's question on how to get his roast potatoes to the same standard as his late mother's for Christmas day. 

He said he wanted his: "Roast potatoes to be the best roast potatoes anyone in the family has ever tasted in the history of roast potatoes, or at least since they last had one of mum's." 

The Hairy Bikers gave some top tips for cooking potatoes. They recommended part boiling them, blanching them for about eight minutes, and then letting the potatoes go cold before proceeding further. 

However Dave also said that the quality of supermarket potatoes often did not lead to a good roastie: "The problem I have is that when you buy a potato from a supermarket, you don't know what kind of potato it is. You don't know how long it has been stuck there.

"The potato starts to produce sugar, and then you'll never get it crispy because it's more water than potato. You need to get a good variety of potato, and a potato that hasn't been stored for six months or a year."

Dave then spoke about a previous project that the Hairy Bikers had to make 'the ultimate chips.'

"In the end we went to a farm near me, we got some potatoes in a farm in Flookbrugh, which had been dug, and miraculously our chips were magnificent.

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"We must have done about six batches from various potatoes in supermarkets and we were getting nowhere with it." 

He said that the same principle applied to making roast potatoes. If the potato is tasting a bit sweet, Si said that it is because the potato had been stored 'for a protracted length of time.' 

They both recommended going to the local greengrocer's as the staff would know where the potatoes had come from and how long they had been stored. 

The pair said that Carroll's Potatoes in Cornhill-on-Tweed in Northumberland was an example of a producer of high-end quality potatoes.