First, you put all the dry ingredients in a big stainless bowl—200 grams of standard potato granules, 250g of all-purpose flour, and 3g of salt. Once they’re incorporated, you can form a well in the center for the wet ingredients—four eggs, 200 milliliters of water.

Mix until everything coagulates into a stiff dough. You massage it until it forms into a ball which you need to let rest in the chiller for an hour before cutting it into four pieces. Transfer the quartet onto a flour-dusted surface (another 50g of all-purpose flour needed for dusting); sprinkle flour on these balls as well. 

Flatten each ball with a rolling pin to the thickness you want. Fold the sheets of dough and cut into noodles with a knife. Remember to dust with flour so the strings don’t stick together.

In a sauce pan or stockpot, boil water with salt and cook the batches of noodles in them using a strainer for two minutes each.

Voila, you now have potato noodles—just one of the myriad ways the starchy root vegetable can be used to make a meal, aside from its more popular forms as chips, French fries, or hash browns.

The potato noodles made from scratch was the first potato meal cooked by Raintree Restaurant Group’s corporate chef Kalel Chan in a media event held on Sept. 26 at Chef’s Table and Kitchen in Brittany Hotel, BGC.  

The event, organized by Potatoes USA, was meant to demonstrate the versatility of the staple crop that has come thousands of miles from a farmland in the United States to a sleek metropolitan hotel in the Philippines. The American potato is ubiquitous and diverse in texture: You’d be surprised how often you’d find it in most dishes cooked in local restaurants, fast-food joints, and home kitchens. Or perhaps it’s not too much of a surprise. The potato is, after all, well-loved by both those who cook and those who eat.

Sheer size and volume

In the vast farmlands of the United States, all you’d see is an endless sky above endless row crops. These farmlands can be found all across that country, especially in the western states such as Washington, Oregon, California, and especially Idaho.

“When we say ‘farms’ in the US, they’re not small,” Reji Retugal, Philippine representative of Potatoes USA, said in her introduction to the event before the cooking demonstrations. “They’re hundreds of thousands of acres.”

Unlike in our Philippine farmlands of staple crops, these American farmlands are not framed by trees or mountains where you can see the edge of things. If you were to travel through this landscape, it would feel like driving for hours on a treadmill of a road with acres and acres of fields on either side of you, as far as the eye can see.

Because of the sheer size, and consequently the volume, of potato yields in a standard American farm, much of potato production—from farming to harvesting to storing to processing—requires advanced technology that would mechanize and accelerate the whole process. To help ease access in the procurement of equipment and farming solutions, most farmlands have consolidated from what used to be thousands of small potato farms into what may be called “co-ops.” This arrangement aids the farmer in acquiring, say, a high-capacity potato harvester, or methods in blight detection in food processing.

Largest supplier

Yields usually depend entirely on the weather. Sometimes Europe has more output, other times the United States. Price is also directly related to these changeable conditions.

“And you can’t control it,” Retugal said. “You can farm as much as you want, but the weather is the weather.”

Even then, the United States is the largest supplier of potatoes to the Philippines. Among its many potato products available in our local markets, instant mashed is a staple in supermarkets and can be available in bulk or wholesale especially for retail food services such as big caterers, fast-food chains, and busy restaurants, who no longer have to “open their kitchens at 3 [a.m.] just to boil, wash, peel, cut, and mash potatoes,” Retugal said.

“Now they just heat water, put in the [stuff], add whatever they want—salt, milk, butter—and it’s instant mashed,” she said.

But in the market for American potatoes, the most popular is frozen potatoes—and the Philippines is the largest market for it in all of Southeast Asia.

“Luzon, Visayas, Mindanao … We consume our frozen potatoes with gusto. Everywhere you go, there’s some kind of frozen potato, and the majority of that is from the US,” Retugal said. “We love our frozen potatoes. And we’re just happy to present them to you because these are quality potatoes.”

Versatile and diverse

One of their long-time collaborators is Chef Kalel, who was among the first to join Potatoes USA events in Boracay, when he was only 17 years old.

At Thursday’s event, in one of the many cooking stations in the large, airy kitchen enclosed in glass walls, he whipped up two dishes: the US Potato Ramen (made of hand-made potato noodles and topped with Sichuan dan dan sauce) and the mapo tofu potato cheese fries.

For both dishes, he wasted no time even as he verbally and visually guided participants through the cooking process and answered questions. While cooking the potato noodles, he also made several varieties of pasta cuts with the leftover dough, before putting the cooked noodles in a bowl and pouring in the dan dan sauce made of Sichuan ground pepper, sugar, prepared chili oil, grated garlic, tahini, soy sauce, and five-spice powder.

It took around five minutes, or what felt like it, and even less for the mapo tofu dish with the cheese fries already cooked and seasoned. On a pan over high heat, he sautéed garlic, ginger, onions, and ground pork until brown, before pouring in the rest of the seasonings: sake, mirin, shoyu, sugar, Sichuan pepper, tobanjan paste, sesame oil, and a little bit of water. This was simmered to a thick consistency, added with the silken tofu, and then poured onto the seasoned crisp fries with grated cheese and chopped spring onions. He ran a blowtorch on top of the dish to melt the cheese into the sauce and fries.

It seemed simple enough, if only it was not demonstrated by an executive chef who worked fast and accurately at multiple kitchen tasks. It takes a certain intuition in terms of timing and proportioning of ingredients. Indeed, how does one account for the pleasant balance in the hot cheese fused into the smooth, evenly spiced sauce and the silken tofu melting cooly on the tongue after biting off a crispy seasoned potato wedge from that dish, if not some kind of instinct—a gut feel, if you will—of the best pairings for certain experiences in food? But he also regularly encouraged adjusting based on preference: “You can put more chicken stock if you feel it’s too dry” for the noodles, or “You can use other kinds of fries other than wedges.”

In the experiential cooking segment after Chef Kalel’s demonstration, participants tried their hand in potato dishes of their choice, from tater tots seasoned with paprika, to burrito bowls, to fries wrapped in beef strips. These dishes all incorporate frozen potato varieties that are widely available in supermarkets or even local groceries, and can be modified based on the ingredients readily available.

“The idea is to not aim for something that chefs would do,” Retugal said of the event. “We want to show you that we can create healthy, delicious, fast meals at home, using frozen potatoes.”

Core objective

This is a core objective of Potatoes USA. Formerly called US Potato Board before rebranding six years ago, they research extensively and market US potatoes by initiating programs that target consumers, food service operators, retailers, and health professionals, engaging in social media campaigns and collaborating with chefs in potato recipe construction for the average home cook or consumer. They also plan on a macro scale, aiming for global markets for American potatoes by establishing new trades.

But on ground level, the organization concentrates on consumer outreach, such as in supermarkets. They do tasting programs and invite chefs to create easy potato recipes that can be done by anyone. In particular, they regularly collaborate with chefs, as well as restaurants and food industry powerhouses, to promote US potatoes.

“Name a chef [in the Philippines], and we’ve probably worked with them or are working with them,” Retugal remarked.

But despite their aim of increasing demand and driving awareness of their potatoes, they make it clear that they are not in the selling business. “What we do is we represent the [US] farmers, and we share with you information that we think is important for you to share with consumers,” Retugal said. And, she said, Potatoes USA does not promote specific brands: “Anywhere from the US is our potato.”

“Farmers are the most hardworking people you will ever meet, whether they are Filipino farmers or American farmers.” Retugal added. “They are not a brand. They are their products. So their commitment is to the product, wherever it goes, whoever eats it. They want to make sure, whether it goes to the Philippines, to China or domestic, that it’s the best potato that comes out of their farm.”

Read more: ‘People who love to eat are always the best people’