How to Prepare Potatoes for Greek Fish Plaki

Video Transcript

VICTORIA GUTAVAS: Hi, back to our next segment. And here what I'm going to teach you is about the potatoes. Now again in this particular recipe, what I've decided to do is go with a smaller-size red potato, and the reason that I've done that are for several--there's several reasons. One, that they're easier to cut up, and they are easier to cut up into bite-size pieces which is what we want for this dish. The second reason is a red potato versus a white potato. Red potatoes are actually softer, and they have their own distinct flavor and taste. So when actually cooking this dish, you want to try and you want to use the red potatoes. Now in actual peeling, I have this great little peeler that has a sharp end to it and a nice double-blade. And what I'm going to do is go ahead and peel the potato very carefully so that I don't take off my own fingers and skin with it, and when I get around to the sides of the potato, for those of you that may be cooking for the first time for a special someone in your life, gentlemen. When you're actually going into this dense part of the potato, which we call them the eyes of the potato, this little handy gadget at the end is going to help you dig that out, so it'll be easy for you to peel the rest of the potato up. And as you can see, it takes a couple of nice strokes of the potato peeler to do this evenly and nicely, and you don't want to take off a lot of the potato, just get the red off. For those of you that are health oriented, what you may want to do is leave the skins on. I mean, this dish was always done in our family by peeling them, but I have tried it with the skins on and it tastes just the same. But if you are going to leave the skins on, what I do recommend is that you get a good vegetable scrubber and scrub those skins of all the potatoes. So once all the skin is off the potato, what you're going to do is hold it down pretty firmly and slice through the middle. And then once you sliced through the middle, put it flat down on your cutting board. This will actually ground the potato and it won't be rolling around, so you have less chance of cutting yourself. And then you'll cut it again in half and then cut those in half, so you've actually quartered each half of your potato. What you can do if you want to is, as we've done for this particular filming, is we cut up these potatoes in advance, and potatoes will not get brown if you put them in water, lukewarm or cold water. And what we did with the rest of these potatoes, we actually used eight small potatoes, and here we are, we've got the rest of them cut up in those bite-size pieces, nice little triangles, and they're all done the same way. So when dish is assembled, they're all going to be the same size, the same shape and that's just going to add a little bit of continuity to your dish.

Community Members who...

• Favorited this Video
• Rated This Video

Top Tags