Spud Sunday: Desert Island Spud

What would you do if you had just one spud?

Would you boil it, steam it or mash it? Bake it, fry it or roast it?

Perhaps you’d chunk it up for salad or layer it into a gratin.

Or go the deep fat fryer route and turn it into crisps or chips.

It’s one of those desert island questions (albeit a desert island that comes, it would have to be said, with a fully equipped kitchen).

And the desert island answer? For me, without hesitation, the potato would have to be baked.

One potato, baked

There’s something so self-contained about a baked potato. In fact, if you really were cast away on a desert island with naught but a lonesome spud, baking it in the embers of a camp fire might, in fact, be the most realistic of your options (assuming you had the whole fire-making thing down, that is).

Whether you cook it by such ancient means or not, a baked potato, with its crispy, edible shell and piping hot flesh, is a meal that needs very little to complete it. It’ll want salt, naturally, but what spud doesn’t? Add butter and you need go no further.

Inevitably, though, there will be times when you don’t want to stop there. Happily, the baked potato is a canvas on which you may design freely. Split it in two, scoop out the flesh and mix with whatever you have that takes your fancy. Apart from the inevitable butter and salt, mine would involve some kind of cheese and some kind of onion (and I’d dearly like to think that I would never lack either). Perhaps I’d add herbs, perhaps mustard (even though I do, occasionally, run out of that). You might like to add bacon bits and sour cream, or maybe mash in a little tuna. I’ve even been known to make it banh mi style or add an egg. In the end, the only real problem is that one baked potato might not be enough.

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