In The Potato Hack, I shy away from using sweet potatoes. Mainly because they are not potatoes. However, SpudFit has decided to include sweet potatoes in his long-term potato diet.
Potatoes lack Vitamins A and E. Sweet potatoes are full of both. By adding some sweet potatoes to the menu, you are filling in some gaps in nutrients very nicely. Plus, they are a bit sweeter, a nice respite from regular potatoes. If you've done any length of potato hack, well, you know what I mean, haha.
I've never been a real fan of sweet potatoes, the usual way I've eaten them is as a side-dish at Thanksgiving, covered in brown sugar and little marshmallows. Way too sweet for my taste. But today on the Spudtember FB page, someone posted a video to "Sweet Potato Flat Bread." This got my attention!
The recipe in the video calls for mashed sweet potatoes and "all-purpose" wheat flour. As I'm not a fan of white wheat flour, I decided to make these using potato starch instead. They turned out just perfect!
I boiled 3 big (white colored) sweet potatoes until tender, cooled and peeled them, then added organic potato starch, 1/4 cup at a time, until it was nice and doughy, then divided it into smaller balls.
I simply pressed the dough balls onto the bottom of a warm ceramic frying pan, making them as thin as I could. I cooked at a medium high heat until the bottom was browned, and flipped. They did not stick at all, and stayed moist and stretchy, like you would expect flatbread to be.
Check out my dinner tonight, a flatbread potato salad sandwich (or three)! mmmmm
And the potato salad? Minimal ingredients: Potatoes, vinegar, mustard, veggie broth.
Conclusion
Sweet potatoes are good, real food and are similar enough to a potato to be included on a potato diet, and in fact, should be encouraged. There is slim chance you will have any problems on a 3-5 day hack, but if you are trying a longer potato diet, over two weeks, it's probably best to add sweet potatoes to fill any nutritional gaps.
Later!
Tim
Hey Tim, off-topic but maybe you know this article ?
ReplyDeletePaleo poo
Just found it interesting ...
I read the article. Thanks for linking. It's a little unnerving the way they simply say, "Eat vegetables and fruits and you'll get your fiber." I decided to count my fiber about three weeks ago. A huge heaping plate of red cabbage, cucumber, cilantro, onion, mango, and melon (a measured three heaping cups worth) gave me only at most 8 grams worth of fiber. So I sprinkled it with flax to give me 2 more grams. My plate was FULL. My kids said, "Oh, mom! That ought to give you your fiber for the day." I couldn't even eat but three bites of the steak my husband had grilled for me. So if I ate three plates of this a day, that's still only 30 grams.
DeleteEven when I add in beans or grains/seeds, getting 50 grams is difficult. Easier, but still I'm right at the 50 gram cusp. (Albeit, I am not counting any resistant starch because it's not easily obtainable information.) I cannot even comprehend how historically anyone ate 100 grams!
Sorry for the rant. Tim was counting for awhile, and it motivated me to peg a number to my intake. Was eye opening.
However, potato and sweet potato make the numbers jump a bit. I'm glad the sweet potato is in there, but I still hope the sweet potato doesn't pull any food addicts out of the arena by keeping cravings going.
Terri -
DeleteI went through this at the start of my gut experiment. I thought it was inconceivable that anyone could get 150 g per day, which is what I understood then about Paleo poo. Then, I watched an odd critique of the Paleo diet that showed pictures of the vegetables as they would have looked back then. The cabbage, cucumber, onion, mango, and melon are very likely cultivated fat, juicy, and sweet descendants of something a lot different. I've read that people wouldn't eat bananas and watermelons if they are like they were. Corn too.
That's why I supplement with fibers. Honestly, though, I'm calling flaxseed a supplement even though it's part of a plant. Likewise for chia, amla, baobab, green banana flour, etc. but like you, I found it very hard to stay consistly above 50 g per day without supplements!
I forgot to say that I recently got some wild fennel. Just stuff growing naturally on the corner of a farm. It sort of looked similar to the store stuff, but it was extremely chewy. It was also very, very tasty compared to the regular stuff. In fact, we had a guest who loves fennel (unknown to usin advance), and she raved about the salad. She had several servings! But it was easy to see that the wild stuff would be less popular for a typical person. I had to cut it in a way that made it easier to chew. But my was it good.
DeleteVery interesting, Wilbur. Reminds me of when we travel tropical and they serve a lot of tiny, green bananas that have been boiled in their skins. They even make a "potato salad" out of them.--- I have an affinity for fennel. When I'm home to Indiana next, I'll have to look for wild. I have cultivated now in my garden.
DeleteAnd oops--I forgot to comment on this post! These "wraps" look so great! I can seem my family easily eating these! Thanks!
Funny how almost everyone who looks into how much fiber we needs quickly concludes that the ~30g recommendation is a) hard to get, and b) not enough.
DeleteThen they look to supplementing, in the article's case, Mercola uses "6TBS of psyllium per day".
What I have evolved to, I guess, is trying to get as much food fiber every day by choosing the higher-fiber forms of the foods I eat, ie. cooked and cooled beans, rice, potatoes and stems/leaves/whole grain, seeds when possible. Then take a fiber supplement most days, but not always. I have a jar of Hi-Maize and a jar of PS, plus many bags of seeds and powders to choose from. No real science, just do.
I suppose it used to be a lot easier to get a higher amount of fiber in historical times.
DeleteJust looking at the image of some of the older fruits they seem very fibrous:
http://i.imgur.com/zZhvIrd.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/UWX5J8N.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/SNhbZHF.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/vWEqIid.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/61ObDvy.jpg
I recently came across something about potatoes being eaten in Peru. People near the andes mountains made a dish called "Chuño". They apparantly grow a wide variety of potatoes there (http://i.imgur.com/FcGqZjG.jpg) and consume them raw;
"After harvest, potatoes are selected for the production of chuño, typically small ones for ease of processing. These small potatoes are spread closely on flat ground, and allowed to freeze with low night temperatures, for about three nights.
Between the freezing nights, they are exposed to the sun, and they are trampled by foot. This eliminates what little water is still retained by the potatoes, and removes the skins, enabling subsequent freezing.
After this, they are exposed to the cold for two additional nights."
I wonder how much resistant starch these people took in on a daily basis.
,Yannel
I'd bet that the Chuno-eating people got loads of RS. I actually made some chuno, accidentally, last Spring. I'll take some pictures for a post this month.
DeleteCool photos, Yannel. Thanks. I've eaten the one, a guanabana (cherimoya). We actually bought some canned, and it is very fibrous indeed. The others I've not seen!
DeleteYes, thanks, ,Yannel!
DeleteI've been growing a bumper crop of 'beyond organic' tomatoes this summer. Been eating a LOT of raw tomatoes especially the little cherry ones. Paleo poo? Cow pies more like it.
DeleteThe purple asparagus beans steamed and stir fried with shallots and sweet red peppers also contribute to the 'mass effect'.
If cabbage is braised, a person can get a lot more fibre in a smaller volume than when it's raw. 2 cups of raw, shredded cabbage is mostly air.
DeleteVegetable stews of various types, 2 cups per day, makes a difference because even if in absolute terms of 'fibre' they may not boost anyone to 50 grams per day, but for me, at least, this works well.
About a month ago I bought one of those bagged kale salads from Costco. The one with a little bag of sunflower and pumpkin seeds and dried cranberries. I ate the whole bagful of raw kale and next day was non eventful in the toilet department. I must say it took some concerted effort to eat the whole thing. Probably 8 cups of shredded vegetation if not more.
I just tried this recipe with baked purple sweet potatoes, not peeled, mashed in the food processor, out of the 'fridge. The peel got chopped tiny, so was not obvious. I think the processing made it gluey.
ReplyDeleteI added the potato starch by hand, and couldn't believe how much it absorbed. Which brings me to wondering:
We lose all of the RS value of the potato starch, right? Maybe potato flour would be a better choice (but I don't have any), being more of a whole food.
Amazing how the starch just disappears, eh? Another FB person tried making these with potato flour and said they ended up dry and cracked. The starch is key, it gels and makes the flatbread soft and gooey.
DeleteI can imagine this recipe works really well using self-rising white flour (which I hate). But alternatively, I'll bet these could be made with Hi-Maize corn starch which retains its RS even when cooked.
Yes, using potato starch, the RS is mostly ruined. But, cooled overnight and eaten cold....reminds me, I need breakfast and I have two flatbreads left!
I've been reading up on chickpea flour (gram flour, garbanzo flour) as a good protein source, a high fiber source, so could be used in making these flat breads. I will give it a try and see how it works out.
DeleteI would think we need to buy the ORANGE sweet potato to get the vitamin A. Isn't it the caroteen from carrots that give us our dose of vitamin A ??
Jo tB
Hi Tim,
ReplyDeleteA mix of boiled mashed potatoes and nixtamalized corn flour - like masa harina - is a standard recipe to make flatbread in most parts of rural Himalayas mountain people. On the slopes of these mountains, all over North East India and Nepal, they have a short growing season which is used to grow corn and potatoes. Only recently has commercial wheat flour reached them as technology has made roads to these areas. Traditionally they survive on Potatoes, corn, Amaranth, some vegetables and Yak (a type of mountain buffalo) milk and butter.
Isn't that cool. Strange that the people in the Himalaya's gravitated to a diet like they had in the Andes. Living in mountains must be demanding. You need lots of calories for energy due to terrain and weather, but only a few things grow there.
ReplyDeletePotato flatbreads. How could have I forgotten this recipe. My grandmother used to make them on the stove top (not in the pan). With plum jam (powidl) and grounded poppy seeds.
ReplyDeletemy grandmother used to make plum jam from nothing but plums. Long slow process in the oven until it got very thick and very dark. Oh, just did a google search: powidl is the same thing. She'd be having to get up during the night to stir it with a big wooden spoon.
Delete1 tablespoon of this 'szilva lekvar' and if anyone was constipated, this stuff got things moving biggie time.
Exactly, nothing but plums. No sugar added. Very think, lasts long.
Delete"thick"
DeleteYou have to make this stuff at home because all the plum products in the store are diluted with sugar. Not thick at all. I've given up looking. The closest I got was a jar from Serbia. And making it here now is almost impossible. The blue plums are not sold ripe enough and everytime I've looked for them, they are super expensive. You need a bushel of plums to make it worth cooking them down for lekvar (powidl). This year we had a drought. Lots of farmers lost most of their crop.
DeleteThis recipe - and the potato pizza dough you posted - are perfect ideas! I'll be making them both. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the flatbread recipe. Which ceramic pan did you use, and do you recommend it? I looked in your Amazon store so that I could buy one through your link, and didn't see one. - Callie
ReplyDeleteI love ceramic pans! This is the one I have (Bialetti, 12"): http://amzn.to/2cmjYSk
DeleteI'm pretty rough on pans, teflon never lasted a couple months before it was scratched. I get 6-12 mo out of ceramics. They do start to wear down from use, though.
I also have this ceramic pan set: http://amzn.to/2c5f8qa No complaints.
Thanks, I appreciate the links. The Bialetti didn't come up when I did my own search on Amazon for ceramic pans. Good to know re: the lifespan. That echos what other reviews seem to say about them. I tend to like my pans to last a good long time, but it might be worth the splurge to be able to make some truly fat-free dishes. - Callie
DeleteHave no idea if this pan can live up to the hype, but it looks kinda interesting: https://www.thegrommet.com/solidteknics
DeleteKaren
My cast iron still looks new after 30 years. But Tim's not allowed to use cast iron on his fancy-pants cooktop.
ReplyDeleteDitto. When they are well seasoned, they last forever.
DeleteAnd iron does not get into the food because of the layer of hardened fat. One of my kids wanted to take off with my fry pan. Uh uh. Season your own! Darn tootin'.
Off topic. New report from Dr. Greger, NutritionFacts regarding RS and whole grains etc. Supports Tims views I think. http://nutritionfacts.org/video/getting-starch-to-take-the-path-of-most-resistance/?utm_source=NutritionFacts.org&utm_campaign=996de85240-RSS_VIDEO_DAILY&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_40f9e497d1-996de85240-23684697
ReplyDeleteThat's pretty good. The last two years of my blog in 6 minutes, lol. Even what he says at the end that "RS supplements do not work," I take some exception to his words, but I think he did not think it through. All the studies he mentions use supplemental PS and Hi-Maize, he only pick one study (RS for hereditary colon cancer) to show it was not effective. But I do agree that we should not take RS supplement, ie. potato starch, on an otherwise fiberless diet. Should be used alongside other fibers to ensure the distal effects as the video mentions.
DeleteGreat find! Thanks for sharing.