Yukon Gold Potatoes
Yukon Gold potatoes are ideal all-around spuds. They are not as mealy as white potatoes and not as waxy as red potatoes, making them perfect for any method you might use to cook a potato.
They are smallish in size, ranging from 4 to 10 ounces. The skin is relatively thin. The meat is yellow and absolutely packed with flavor.
If you see potatoes in the store, labeled as simply “Gold,” you can identify Yukon Gold by their shallow, pinkish eyes. But why buy them, when you can easily grow your own?
Growing Yukon Gold
Yukon Gold potatoes take 70 to 90 days from planting to harvest. Like other potatoes, they are a cool season crop.
Here in Tennessee timing can be tricky. We plant in mid April, with an eye on the weather against a late hard freeze. Although young plants burned by frost will re-emerge, loss of those first leaves reduces the yield.
On the other hand, the plants don’t do well in warm weather. So we want to get them harvested before summer temperatures reach the 90s.
The ideal seed potatoes are about the size of an egg. We plant them in raised beds, 18 inches apart, covering them with compost, and working in a little Epsom salt to improve the harvest.
As the plants grow, they need to be hilled without burying any leaves. Proper hilling keeps the maturing potatoes from reaching the soil’s surface, where the sun would turn them green.
The plants need one to 2 inches of water each week. Irregular watering results in weird shapes and hollow centers.
The only significant potato pest we’ve encountered is the Colorado potato beetle. I keep a pitcher of soapy water in the garden shed, ready to grab whenever I see a beetle. If I scoop it into the pitcher before it falls to the ground or flies away, it’ll drown. Wherever I see a mature beetle, I look under the leaves for egg clusters or red beetle larva, and brush those into the pitcher.
Harvest and Store
As the potatoes near harvest, the tops will start to yellow. That’s the time to stop watering.
The potatoes are ready to harvest 2 weeks after the plants die back. Those 2 weeks allow time for the skins to thicken and the flavor to develop.
In good years we get 10 pounds of potatoes for every pound planted. Each pound yields about about 6 seed potatoes, resulting in 6 plants.
Once the potatoes are harvested, we let them cure on sheets of cardboard in the garage. When they are good and dry, we brush off any dirt before storing them. Potatoes keep better if you don’t wash them until you are ready to use them.
The ideal storage condition for Yukon Gold potatoes is 40ºF to 50ºF and 90% humidity. Before storing them, we sort them by size.
Sorting Yukon Gold Potatoes
The smallest ones are about the size of new potatoes, which is basically what they are. Our favorite way to prepare them is to roast them in a pan with oven-fried chicken.
The next size up we reserve for breakfast. I boil a batch in the skins and store them in the fridge. Once they’ve been boiled, they’re super easy to peel. For breakfast I peel one and cut it in two directions with an egg slicer, making what looks like mini French fries. A few minutes alongside an egg in the frying pan and they’re ready to serve.
The egg-size spuds we save for replanting. Experts tell you not to do that, but when enough time is left before first frost, we’ll go for a second harvest in the fall. The following spring, however, we start over with certified seed potatoes.
The potatoes in the mid size range, between egg size and the largest ones, we use for things like baking, French fries, or crockpot roast.
The largest potatoes are used for things like canning and making potato salad, because peeling the biggest ones is the fastest way to ready a pile of potatoes at once. Since we generally have enough to last until the next harvest, we don’t can a lot of potatoes. But in years when we have an especially good harvest, we can them as insurance against a year when the harvest isn’t that great.
Potato Salad
When we first started growing Yukon Gold potatoes we thought they were unsuitable for making potato salad because they readily fall apart when boiled. Great for smashed potatoes, not so great for salad. Then, from Carol Deppe’s book The Resilient Gardener, I learned a cooking trick.
Scrub the number of potatoes you normally use for potato salad. Select potatoes of basically the same size, so they all cook at the same rate.
Place them, unpeeled, in a pot with a steamer basket. Add 1 teaspoon of salt and enough cold water to cover the potatoes. Cover, bring to a boil, turn down heat and simmer 10 minutes.
Pour off the excess water, leaving just enough to fill underneath the steamer. Cover and steam for 20 minutes (25 minutes for the big ones), until you can easily insert a skewer. Some of the skins may crack, but that’s okay. Cool them, peel them, and use them in your favorite potato salad recipe.
French Fries
I once read that McDonald’s discontinued using Yukon Gold potatoes for French fries, because they got too crisp. But that’s the way I like them.
At home I can make them as crunchy as I like. But I’m not a fan of deep frying. So I was happy to discover an easy and terrific recipe for oven fries.
For generous servings for two, scrub and peel one large potato or two medium ones. Cut them lengthwise into ¼ inch strips. Soak the strips for 20 minutes in bowl of cold water. Rinse off the water and blot the strips dry.
In a dry bowl, toss the strips with 1 tablespoon of oil. I use peanut oil, but any neutral oil will work.
Line a baking sheet with foil, place a cookie rack on top, and spread the strips on the rack so they don’t touch. Sprinkle the strips with coarse salt.
Bake the potatoes in a preheated oven at 450ºF for 35 minutes, or until they are golden brown and crisp. Served with catsup and a side of cole slaw, oven fries make a nutritious and satisfying meal.
