The Eternal Potato Question: Which Potatoes Are Best For Baking, Roasting, Mashing, Boiling, Frying?

By Clare

Culinary skills & styles Expertise Foodie knowledge Fruit and vegetables Meals and courses Recipes Sides Specialist ingredients Super-easy Type Vegetarian Watching the dosh

In this post:

Brief introduction
Table 1: potato cooking methods and the type of potato to use for each with links to the methods
Table 2: comprehensive list of some 150 odd potato types by category – waxy, floury or all-purpose

For a whole host of other posts about potatoes follow this link.

To browse the rest of this site (there are posts on all kinds of surprising things) follow this link.

“I bought a big bag of potatoes and it’s growing eyes like crazy. Other foods rot. Potatoes want to see.”
Bill Callahan Letters to Emma Bowlcut

Yes, but how to cook them before they do? And which variety can be used for what? You can’t go too far wrong with a Maris Piper – in the UK more of this type of potato is grown than any other and it’s fine for chips, roast potatoes, mash and wedges.

Here are some helpful guidelines for which readily available potatoes to use for what, and in the table underneath that there is a comprehensive list of potato types and the categories they fall into.

If you want to feel inspired to grow potatoes, watch The Martian – see the trailer at the bottom of this post.

Keep your potatoes in a cool, dark place otherwise the starch will turn to sugar.

If your potatoes have turned green it’s because they’ve been exposed to light which has increased their alkaloid levels. This can be harmful and often causes bitterness – if the potato is big and the green area small you can cut out the green flesh, otherwise toss the whole potato away.

1. Potato cooking methods and type of potato to use

Cooking method	Potato type
Roast Recipe: Super-excellent roast potatoes	Desirée, Cara, King Edward, Maris Piper, Romano, Wilja
Baked (in jacket) Recipe: How to cook the best ever baked potatoes in their jackets	Estima, Marfona or Viking…. also King Edward and Maris Piper.
Fried Recipe: Fried potatoes – earthy rich simplicity – a poem of potatoes	Russet
Boiled	Jersey Royals or Yukon Gold
Mashed	Russet, Maris Piper or Caribe if you want smooth; Smash if you want instant! Charlotte or Yukon Gold if you like lumpy but more flavour (with effort you can, in fact, achieve a smoother, more velvety texture with waxy potatoes); Highland Burgundy Red and Salad Blue if you want stunning, colourful, looks
Salad Recipe: German potato salad or Potato salad with smoked salmon	Pink Fir Apple, Jersey Royals, Cyprus, Jazzy. BUT remember, as Nigel Slater (Kitchen Diaries III) comments “Large, floury-textured potatoes can be wonderful in a salad despite what purists say. The whole ‘salad potato’ dictum is a bit of a red herring.” Rules are made to be broken!
Dauphinois Recipe: Creamy, dreamy dry stone wall dauphinois	King Edward or Maris Piper – although some advocate waxy potatoes, in my view floury are much better.
Pommes Anna	Russet (floury); or Desirée, Yukon Gold; fingerlings or Nicola (waxy) probably better. You don’t want them to fall apart
Gnocchi	Russet (floury)

2. Different potato types and how to use them

Fluffy, starchy	Waxy	All-purpose, smooth
For: roast potatoes, potatoes in their jackets (baked), mashed potatoes, fried potatoes	For: salads, soups and stews. Includes red-skinned, ‘fingerling’. No need to peel	OK for roasting, mashing and baking
Agria	Adirondack Blue – purple skin and blue-purple flesh – the colour deepens when roasted and fades when mashed. Earthy and nutty to taste. Don’t use for soups.	Accord
Bruise	Adirondack Red – red skin with pink flesh which fades with cooking. As for Blue, don’t use in soups.	Allura
Arran Victory⁴	Annabelle	All Blue (again, lives up to its name)
Cara (see Picasso in ‘waxy’)	Anya	Apache
Caribe (has a purple skin)	Arran Comet	Bintje – a Dutch-bred type, yellow flesh, yellow skin. Very popular in France and Belgium. The potato of choice for frites.
Chippewa	Austrian Crescent	Casablanca (chipping, baking or boiling)
Coliban (Australian)	Bambino	Chopin
Daisy	Belle de Fontenay – very popular French variety, good for salads	Desirée
Dunbar Rover	Carlingford	Dundrod
Fiana	Carola	Estima (especially good for jacket potatoes)
Golden Wonder	Charlotte	Golden Delight
Highland Burngundy Red	Cliff Kidney	Harmony
Idaho (also Idaho Russet)	Corolle	Karaka
Ilham Hardy	Cyprus¹	Katahdin
Innovator	Duke of York	Kennebec
Highland Burgundy Red⁷	Dutch Creams – very popular, rich, buttery taste. Although waxy are also good roasted, baked, and mashed	Lady Balfour
Kerr’s pink	Exquisa	Marabel
King Edward (red)	French Fingerling, or just Fingerling – approx. five cm long, and thin… like fingers!	Marfona (especially good for jacket potatoes)
Lady Claire	Gallante	Maris Bard
Lady Rosetta	Heather	Melody
Maris Anchor	Home Guard	Moonlight
Maris Piper (although fluffy, a good all-rounder. Good for chips)	Inca Dawn	Mozart
Pentland Crown	Inca Gold	Nadine
Pentland Dell	International Kidney AGM – good buttery flavour	Norland Red
Pentland Hawk	Jazzy²	Osprey
Pentland Ivory	Jersey Royal	Otway Red, red skin, cream flesh
	Jersey Bennes	Pentland Dell
Pentland Squire	Kestrel	Pontiac (good for everything except frying)
Red Duke of York⁵	Kipfler	Purple Majesty (lives up to its name – looks amazing)
Russet	La Bonnotte	Purple Passion – excellent cooker, especially for chips or boiled
Russet Burbank	Lady Christl AGM	Purple Peruvian, deep purple skin, and usually marbled white and inky purple. Dry and starchy texture with a slightly nutty flavour
Salad Blue⁶	La Ratte (many say better than Charlotte	Red Duke of York⁵
Sante	Liseta	Red Gold
Sarpo Mira	Majestic	Red King (New Zealand)
Shetland Black	Maris Piper and Maris Peer⁹	Red Rascal
	Nadine	Rocket
	Nicola	Romano
	Patrone – good in salads, don’t mash	Rooster³
	Pentland Javelin	Royal Blue, purple skin, good mash and roasties
	Picasso. Bred from Cara, has the same creamy skin and striking bright red eyes.	Rua
	Pink Eye (nutty flavour)	Saxon
	Pink Fir Apple AGM (wonderful!)	Sebago (Australian)
	Premiere	Spunta (good in salads)
	Purple Congo – purple skin, can be a bit dry, don’t roast	Toolangi Delight (Australian) – makes good gnocchi
	Purple Heart – deep purple flesh – salads, boiled or microwaved	Vales Sovereign
	Purple Viking	Van Rosa (very red skin)
	Redskin	Viking
	Red Bliss, bright red skin, slightly bitter. Don’t use for mashing	Vivaldi
	Red Duke of York⁵	Wilja
	Red Rose	Yukon Gold
	Red Thumb	Yellow Finn (or Finnish)
	Rocket
	Rose Finn Apple
	Rose Gold – don’t mash
	Roseval
	Southern Gold (aka Pink Eye, see above)
	Swift
	Ulster Sceptre
	Whitchill
	White Rose

Notes on the table above:

1. Cyprus potatoes are widely used in the middle east where the Jersey Royal might be used in Britain

2. Jazzy is the brand name for a small, waxy, set-skinnned potato. It’s grown in Britain by a group of five farmers based in Cornwall, Norfolk and Lancashire.

3. Rooster is another brand name – a very popular and versatile potato

4. Arran Victory had a true victory with Heston Blumenthal who identified it as the best potato for making chips. “It had the perfect balance of flavour and texture: the glass-like exterior crunching apart readily, the interior soft and delicately fluffy. It’s the contrast of the two that makes a great chip – the mix of two very different textures giving the mouth a sublime surprise – and Arran Victory really delivered that” he relates in his book Total Perfection.

5. Red Duke of York can be eaten as a new potato if harvested early, but is also very good as a baked, jacket potato if left to mature

6. Salad Blue – keeps its bluish colour when roasted and boiled and produces spectacular purple-blue mash

7. Highland Burgundy Red – produces a spectacular bright red mash. Sweet flavour, also good steamed and roasted

8. If you cook potatoes at least 24 hours before eating and then put them in the fridge some of their digestible starches will become resistant, which makes the starches behave more like fibre and is better for you…. not a lot of people know that!

9. Maris Piper… and other potatoes incorporating Maris in their name are named after Maris Lane, the address in Cambridge where the institute that bred them was based. ‘Piper’ was chosen at random simply because it was a word beginning with ‘P’… for ‘potato’.