How to Cook Potatoes Perfectly | Interview and Cooking with Healthy Emmie

all right i'll just have a nice smile on my face hey everybody and welcome to chef aj live i'm your host chef aj and this is where i introduce you to amazing people like you who are doing great things in the world that i think you should know about i'm so excited about today's cooking demo because it's coming right after everybody it's dr john mcdougall today is the most perfect food and it has plenty of protein as you could have learned in the lecture if you had watched it but it's available now on my youtube channel if you want to see dr mcdougall's lecture on protein or his lecture on the potato is going to be done by healthy emmy it's my first time meeting her she's the creator of this lemon starch program she has a wonderful youtube channel and she is going to be teaching us really potato perfection and all the recipes she's demonstrating will be available after the broadcast is a pdf on her website which ishealthyme.org please welcome her to the show it's so nice to meet you hi aj i am beyond thrilled and honored to be here especially on the same day as dr mcdougall i mean come on it was synchronicity i mean this was not planned because he had asked to come on and you were already scheduled and it's like this is perfect because i know you're a big fan of him too aren't you oh a huge fan and you know we are in cahoots i said listen why don't you go on chef aj's show the same day as me and now i wish when did because you're pretty young to know all this when did you first hear of dr mcdougall so i'm 25 and i first heard of dr mcdougall six years ago when i was 19. that is when i started a whole foods plant-based diet and i was actually known at college as the potato girl so that's how long i've been in this game for so you guys can trust me on everything that i'm gonna say today because it's been years in the making well wait so you're going to college and somebody recommended his book because i mean you know most of the people that know him we're a little bit older so how does a 19 year old find out about dr john mcdougall i'm curious about that yeah sure so i discovered whole foods plant-based just on youtube what i eat in a day videos are very popular and just being on youtube they started to pop up on my subscription feed so i started to watch some videos about a whole foods plant-based lifestyle and it just made sense to me i went to college to become a math teacher so i like to think about when there are answers to things and a whole foods plant-based diet seemed to be the answer to everything it made sense to me and when i do something i do it so i decided that day you know what i'm doing this i'm going whole foods plant-based the whole shebang so i went all in six years ago on a whole foods plant-based diet had a tremendous time and what really did it for me was i so badly wanted my parents to be on this lifestyle too i have wonderful parents if you've seen them on the channel they are terrific people and i want them to be around for a long long time and my father bless his heart he was pushing 230 240 250 pounds and i didn't know if he'd be if he'd be around forever and so i thought how can i how can i convince him he's not going to listen to his 19 year old daughter what does she know so my dad loves to read and i found the starch solution and i said you know what i'm going to give him this book and let's see what happens and if you have seen him on my channel you know that about five years ago he transitioned to a starch solution diet and lost over 60 pounds off all of his blood pressure medication um and that's what really did it for me that's what made it sticky was seeing the effect it had on my father and then eventually helping my mother as well with lowering her cholesterol triglycerides and now pretty much the whole family is starch-based family so what i find so interesting about you i mean well first of all it's interesting because just last week i was interviewing a guest that said that most people that go on a plant-based or vegan diet do so between the ages of of like 17 and 25 which perfectly uh correlates with what you said but you're just not on a vegan diet you don't eat junk food you eat a very very healthy version of a vegan diet you eat the same diet i do yeah sure so you might be familiar with the the concept of relationship weight right aj you get into a relationship you gain a lot of weight because you get comfortable well there was a date that changed my life and it caused some relationship with gain and that was the medjool date because when i went on a whole foods plant-based diet i was shoveling medjool dates like the day is long i said these are delicious where have these been my whole life um so what ended up happening was i'm a runner as well my running times were fabulous i felt amazing but then my genes started to not fit so now i was in this conundrum because i loved the whole foods plant-based diet i felt super energized my running times were fantastic but uh the pounds were i was starting to pack on some pounds so i said okay math teacher mode there's a solution to this i know i can solve this problem and by going on whole foods plant-based and getting rid of those richer foods that was the solution to the problem i was still able to get all the benefits of having loads of energy feeling amazing on my runs eating an abundance of food and my jeans still fit so i have been you know a lot of your watchers a lot of your viewers i know are transitioning from a richer vegan diet and that's something i have done myself and so that's how i got to where i am today eating a very very uh similar diet to you yeah well i think i think it's pretty pretty close i mean i've watched a few of your videos and see i mean you don't you don't include salt you don't include oil you don't include sugar sugar as far as i know right yep that's that that's exactly right yeah well me well i mean i sure wish i knew this when i was your age i would have been unstoppable so we have the same favorite food i'm not sure if we have the same favorite kind of potato mine is if i had to pick like really if i got a gun to my head it would probably be the hannah yam but but it's so close you know it's so close you are so right and i have to tell you aj as of recently the past few days that has been my potato of choice because they are just spectacular and for anybody watching that's never had a handy yam i would say if you've ever had honey nut cheerios that is what they taste like so if you're trying to get off the cereal and you like those sugary cereals then have yourself a handy yam in the way that i'm going to tell you how to bake it today and you'll never go back to that other stuff people still i mean you know look at you i mean you're not overweight obviously and you eat a lot of potatoes but people it's still you you could talk until you're blue in the face even when dr mcdougall gave his talk about the potato and they were like well i can't eat potatoes they could eat starch it'll make me fed and it's like so what i actually decided to do is i was sitting on the couch the other day eating my potatoes and i go oh my goodness for all of 2021 all i eat is potatoes it was like the third day of 2021 and i go you know what why don't i do all potatoes for january and i'm gonna document it on my youtube channel so everybody watching right now is getting a little bit of a sneak peek that tomorrow my youtube channel i'm debuting i'm eating only potatoes for the month of january to show people that we can befriend the potatoes so i'm going to be living proof this month so you're not going to have any vegetables at all no just potatoes with i will say because i'm being totally transparent i am having cinnamon because i think that a sweet potato is not complete unless there's cinnamon on it so i am adding cinnamon well that'll be very interesting see because i would miss i would miss to have the i eat more starch than vegetables at least buy calories probably more vegetables but wait but i think i would miss because honey yum needs for me it needs that broccoli with it it's just the um when you're not doing an all potato month what would you say is your ratio of starch to veggies to fruit it doesn't you know that's in terms of calories but mostly because dr mcdougall says we should eat 90 starch that's a little high for me i probably 75 starch and then the rest vegetables and a little bit of fruit that's sort of the way i roll yeah well i'm just like you aj i could eat vegetables for the day as long as a runner i do need to make sure that i get enough in me um so if i were to do you know equal amounts volume wise of starch and vegetables i probably wouldn't get enough indeed to feel amazing on my runs so i would say you know if if i were to eat three meals a day two of them would be half starch half veggies then the last one would be a little bit heavier on the starch so that i can make sure that i running my ability do you do any races or 10ks or marathons yeah so i yeah i am a marathon runner um i want to make sure that i'm able to run for the rest of my life and so for that reason i i'm not doing any races at the moment i would love to be an ultra marathoner which is anything longer than a marathon but i really just run for enjoyment and to feel lucky to have such a healthy body to run in nice so how many different kinds of potatoes do you have there all right let's get into it you ready all right well you know aj maybe you might know i've heard that in peru there is there are like hundreds and hundreds of different types of potatoes that's going to be somewhere i need to go post pandemic is peru to see all the different types i i heard dr milton mills once said it was like 400 at least that's that's crazy that's insane you can eat a different potato every day and it would take over a year to see them all well why don't you do a video on that go to peru awesome all right so i have decided to present these from most flavorful to most boring even though the potato is never boring um but i'm gonna start with the one that has always been one of my favorites which is the japanese sweet potato so i have tried so many different methods to cooking all these different types of potatoes and i used to wrap them in tin foil what i didn't like about wrapping them in tinfoil is that there's a lot of research out there that said tinfoil is not that great for our health there's and i'm no researcher i'm no doctor but i have seen some things about it pointing to perhaps alzheimer's disease it's just some scary stuff but what really really bugged me about my tinfoil use was the amount of waste that i had because i eat a lot of potatoes and if you opened up my recycling bin it was just tin foil on tinfoil yes it was being recycled but even still it's not a you know 10 out of 10 when you recycle something there is some some stuff left behind so i wanted to find a new way to bake my sweet potatoes so that they were super super gooey but they didn't require any waste or any tinfoil so actually everything that i'm doing today is zero waste which is awesome that was one of my goals for 2021 is to reduce my waste as much as possible so starting out with the japanese sweet potato i learned something the hard way as i tried to go to a zero waste method of cooking potatoes and it is that if you put a naked potato into the oven you have to put holes in it so i nearly the other day i mean should have changed my youtube channel name to healthy cyclops because i opened up the oven and nearly lost an eyeball when the potato exploded in my face so if you hear anything on this broadcast please poke your potatoes with whiz a fork so what you do is you're gonna take the japanese sweet potato make sure of course that you have washed it you can get yourself some fancy veggie wash um i i just use water and you can get a potato scrubber on amazon and just scrub off anything that's on the outside of it so you take your take your fork and you'll just stab it a few times why this present prevents it from exploding i will never know but i would not advise that you try to find out yourself so what you're gonna do after you have poached potato is put it into the oven at 375 naked and you're just gonna put it in right on the rack once you do this you'll leave it in there for an hour and then after it's been in there for an hour you can take it out but don't eat it just yet the real secret to having the gooiest most delicious potato which is what i have here is to let it rest in the fridge overnight and then to end up reheating it the next day now i see aj i'm so happy that i'm on a call with you because what you are aj's you are the most glorious intersection between culinary expertise and simple cooking because if you go to a chef and you say how can i make my potatoes delicious they'll say oh take a nice slab of butter and put it on there you go no i can't have butter and they say oh let's put sour cream on and you go no i don't do any of that i'm vegan i don't do oil and then the shuffle short circuit right before your eyes so i want to get i want to get some expertise from you aj do you know why this is that when you put the sweet potato in the fridge and let it rest the next day it is just the flavors are bursting and it's caramelized do you have any idea why okay so i think it has to do with something called the resistant starch in there and they some of the doctors recommend we refrigerate them something about even dr greger in his book it had something to do with weight loss or health i discovered that by accident when i was on a plane and my potato just i didn't eat it and i didn't want to throw it away and i was like okay i'll refrigerate it and then it like you say something magical happens when you cook them chill them and then especially if you cook them again like air fry them oh so there's an idea maybe i can do that but it's just i don't know i bet i agree with you it's just they they taste better it's an absolute game changer um so it looks like that was the best mistake you ever made was not eating the potato and then finding out you know yeah because i was going to throw it away because it got a little bit squished on the plane i'm like yeah but i hate to throw food out so i repurposed it by well at first i put it in the fridge and then i put in the air fryer and i'm like wow this is so much better than if i were just to cut it and airfry it i don't know and i think it has to do with maybe there's somebody scientific that's watching that understands this whole resistance starch thing but you're right it's it's really good when you do it that way and you know i learned something from chef bravo you know i know you have to have some kind of way for heat to escape but instead of poking them i just take take the tiniest cut on both ends of the tip off it's just a tiny cut and then the heat escapes both sides but that's just another option and hey aj because you are the pros stop me at any time during this presentation with any tips you want to add in if this could be a collaborative what's the best way to cook a potato so yeah with the japanese what i do is i poke it or as aj said you can cut off both the ends put it naked in the oven right on the wraps for an hour at 375 fahrenheit i don't know what that is in celsius but potatoes are very forgiving um when i lived in australia i had a i didn't know celsius and even if i did i had an oven that didn't have any numbers on it it and if you think back in the day these people just had a fire and their potatoes i'm sure it turned out just fine so yes put this in the oven at 375 for one hour after poking it or cutting off the ends and then as we just talked about the key is to put it in the fridge overnight and then have it the next day if you put it in the microwave it will heat up very very quickly additionally these guys freeze so well so that is an awesome tip you know i get these huge 20 pound boxes from hawaii veggie farm huge amounts of potatoes and what's so great is that you could bake all of them the entire 20 pounds put them in the freezer and then you can just throw them in the microwave um so that's a great tip it's also a great way to save energy as opposed to turning on your oven every single day you know that will run up your electricity bill quite high and you know waste a lot of energy so what you can do instead is on sunday or whatever day you have off from work bake a ton of these potatoes put them in the freezer and then you're good to go because as if you watch aj you know that your environment has to be conducive to your goals so if you take one sunday you know a sunday well spent is a week's content take one sunday do everything that i'm doing here put it in the freezer and you've done your future self a favor um so i know that dr lyle was on the other day talking about structural changes so if you're looking for a structural change to make you just got yourself one on sundays bake up all your sweet potatoes and put them in the freezer all right the next potato that i'm talking about is one that i would love to get aj's take on and it is her favorite the hannah yam the hannah ham is delicious how it differs from the japanese is the japanese has a little bit more of a chess nutty flavor and it's a little bit more fluffy so i'll cut open the inside of the japanese so that you can see it and then we'll compare it to what we see in the handheld so by cutting open the japanese oh it is so dense it's beautiful it's nice and dense it stays together now a hannah yam i might have trouble even cutting this in half because it's so gooey it reminds me of french toast you know when you would dip back in the day when you have the french toast sticks and you dip them in the syrup and it would get nice and the good kind of soggy that's what i think the hannah yam is like and if you're really young if you're really really lucky it'll start to drool a bit if you will and that means all the sugar is coming out of it so let's see if i can even you know i don't even try to cut these in half because to be honest i'll eat them like a burrito but let me see if i can cut this in half oh i wish you could hear it i wish i had a microphone on this because you can just hear there is so much moisture and it just oh it is so delicious i could put this whole thing in my mouth right now so i cooked this i actually cooked these this morning so i cooked these this morning those are more potatoes i cooked these this morning the same way that i cooked the japanese so 375 and i put them in for an hour and then they went in the fridge let's see it's two o'clock here in boston so they went in the fridge at about 10 a.m so they're in the fridge for about three hours or so so that's really all you need is to put them in the fridge for about three hours and they are so unbelievably gooey so let's see what's going on here yeah those are good so i cooked the ham yam the same way as the japanese make sure that you poke holes or you cut them off please i don't want anybody losing eyebrows because of this demonstration so please make sure that you poke your holes in them and i cook those the same way so aj how do you cook your hannah yams pretty close emmy i like you say first i wash them and then i instead of the poking i just the little tip off the end and i do 400 for about an hour and sometimes i do it for an hour and 15 minutes if they're very very large that's something you have to be careful of if you under cook them it's not a pleasant experience you know sometimes in the middle they can be a little bit tough and it'll taste a little bit bitter um so like i said the potatoes are so forgiving so it's better to go longer than to go shorter for sure yep i agree and i just then then i just shut the oven off i actually cook them in my breville airfryer but i cook them on the roast setting and then when it's done it just i just let them sit there for i let them cool naturally i don't refrigerate them until they have cooled naturally that's something that i heard from my brother is that you never want to put hot food straight into the fridge um for you know bacterial reasons so yes let it cool before you put it straight into the fridge i feel so bad for people that are saying they can't get the hannah or the japanese where they live i've seen them even on amazon though you know what i think that what i might do and perhaps the people i can't get themselves could do this as well i might try myself a little potato garden i live in massachusetts it's freezing here but potatoes like i said are so forgiving they can be grown in so many environments so if you can't get them yourself look into maybe having a potato garden it can't be that hard right my ancestors the irish did hey if matt damon could grow potatoes from his poop on mars we should be able to grow them in our yard right you know what that's the perfect excuse for me to call it ben affleck and say hey i heard your buddy knows how to grow yeah exactly so when you freeze them any uh how do you freeze them in a ziplock in glass because judy says do you defrost them before you reheat them that's a great question so i discovered this one accidentally as well and i had my parents coming over actually and i had all my potatoes out and i was just cleaning up very quickly and i just took the potatoes and i threw them straight into the freezer not in a bag or anything and i forgot they were there and then a couple weeks later i opened up the freezer i go oh my god my potatoes are sitting here in the freezer um and i put them in the microwave and i go let's see what happens straight from the freezer into the microwave and they've reheated beautifully so i put them naked into the freezer and they were just fine i'm sure you'd probably be safer off putting them in a bag or something but went perfectly well just putting them straight into the freezer karen says where in boston are you finding hannah yams whole foods um they have them at whole foods and they also have them at wegmans i find that a lot of times people would check their ethnic markets because not everybody has a whole foods i've never seen hannah at trader joe's i've seen the japanese in the murasaki but but a lot of times at the ethnic markets whether they're a latino ethnic market or an asian ethnic market will have the japanese and the hannah and at a very low price as a matter of fact for sure for sure and when i lived and because i have a lot of people that follow me from australia because i lived there for about a year and they'll say you know where do i get that we don't have trader joe's we don't have whole foods um and i would see them i would see them just like you said at the markets um and i actually would see them at kohl's too so if anybody watching lives in australia they have them at kohl's i mean for the canadian the canadian watchers um i've heard that at asian markets you can find them um and you know it's you'll you'll notice there are no orange sweet potatoes here because once you have the hannah and the japanese you just can't go back that is so funny that you say that because that is that is my least favorite unless it's fries i do like the orange ones if it's sweet potato fries you know somebody messaged me the other day because they said rank your favorite sweet potatoes and so did japanese and then hannah and somebody said well where's the orange and i go oh i don't even mess around with this and somebody messaged me back and she said agree that they're like waterlogged sweet potatoes i think that's the perfect description they're too pedestrian i mean if that's all you can get i'll eat it but it's it is like it is my last my least favorite potato i'm sorry to say i i enjoy them in thanksgiving when they're mashed with cranberry sauce but you know it's like you say once you have a hannah you're kind of spoiled for everything else for sure i was cracking up the other day listening to um dr mcdougall and his wife mary arguing over the difference between a swedish yam i thought that was hilarious i don't know the difference and i think that you took the right approach aj by saying you know what i never get in the middle of a marital squabble so you guys figure it out if you don't mind me asking you mention your significant other isn't plant-based how do you make it work because so many people struggle with that you know absolutely so um i am very blessed to be in a relationship with a wonderful young man who i kind of had the advantage that when i met him i already was this way um and when i met him i knew the stakes were high because i said okay i think i want to keep this one around i like this one and so i said all right you know what i'm gonna i'm gonna run a little test here and see if he passes this test and so i said i'm just gonna be unapologetically myself because i think that is a very it's a very attractive characteristic to be unapologetically yourself and to be confident and secure in who you are um and i don't drink alcohol either and so i met him in you know in our early 20s and i just was the way i was and i said this is the way i eat i don't drink alcohol and i thought to myself if he accepts me then he's the right one and if he doesn't then he's not worth my time um and he passed the test with flying colors and so i have that advantage that i you know entered our relationship this way i know that a lot of people though don't have that advantage where they perhaps are married to somebody that they've been with for 30 40 years and now all of a sudden they're not making the meatloaf anymore and all of that and to those people i say you know you're supposed to grow and change and evolve together and we're not supposed to stay the same our entire lives we get new hairdos and new jobs different places so remember that you know and embrace change um in in changing alongside your significant other but i will tell you aj that my significant other he loves the japanese sweet potatoes and in my freezer i have a huge stalk of vegan junk food he is not vegan he's not even close he's a garbage disposal he'll eat anything that's in front of him so i'm trying to lure him into the plant-based world um but ultimately i think that the purpose of being in a relationship is not to become the same person or to date yourself but instead to to support one another to be the best that you can be you know i support him to do whatever it is that he wants to do and he does the same for me so when we sit down and eat together which is quite often our plates look different but that's the least interesting thing about our relationship is what we eat you know i want to talk about our day and laugh and all that kind of stuff and what's on our plate you know who cares so long as we are happy and healthy that's the most important thing nice yeah all right so moving on to a potato that i'm not so sure about um and it is the stokes purple sweet potato now this the pro the stove's purple sweet potato does not do justice to all the other types of sweet potatoes and especially not to the hawaiian or the okinawan which is purple on the inside but i cooked this one the same way that i cooked the last two which is poke them with a fork put them naked onto the onto the rack in the oven and why don't we break this guy open oh i'm quite impressed actually um wow all right so maybe you guys should try this one out i wasn't too sure about it but wow this is quite a magnificent color so this is the stokes purple sweet potato and it really is just this beautiful vibrant purple which reminds me you know look for all these colors in the food that you eat if it has this beautiful vibrant color you can only imagine the vitamin mineral nutrient panel on this and the amount of antioxidants that are packed in this thing if it's this beautiful there's a reason why this food is so beautiful because we want to be attracted to it to eat it it has to be good for us so this is the stokes purple cooked the same way as the last two aj what are your thoughts on the stokes purple sweet potato first of all color wise they are the most beautiful and i find that i love them but they're inconsistent so sometimes they can be the sweetest thing i've ever eaten even sweeter than the hawaiian at other times i get duds and when i get a dud i get upset i hear ya i hear you you know funny thing is i got this one accidentally and this was not even supposed to be part of the presentation but i do instacart and they accidentally brought me this one so i thought hey i may as well include it um so yeah we got that one all right julie weber looked something up on national geographic and she said there's not 400 kinds of sweet potatoes there's 4 000 wow all right then i gotta get down there awesome um all right cool so next up is the hawaiian sweet potato um now i'm not quite sure and in my eyes the hawaiian and the okinawan are the same thing in my eyes and i would think that makes sense because japan and hawaii are quite close to one another so perhaps that's how it got to hawaii and in the hawaiian soil it might taste a little bit different but if you've had an okinawan it's pretty similar to the hawaiian sweet potato so these guys are quite deceiving because on the outside they're a tan they're a beige but on the inside they are this beautiful beautiful purple color um now we've been talking about hit or miss and sometimes these can be hit or miss but let me tell you how i cooked these guys because these are a little bit different than the other ones so what what's different about the hawaiians is that they're very dense so the other types of sweet potatoes especially the hannah it just kind of melts in your mouth and it's almost like cotton candy you know when you would eat cotton candy or fairy floss it would just like dissolve on your tongue that's kind of what happens with the hannah yam and with the japanese especially with a handy yan but these guys are different because they're quite dense and they're they're a little bit cake like so because they're a little bit more dense they're going to take longer to cook and if you put them naked into the oven then they might not cook to the center so i used to always wrap these in tin foil but when you're ordering them online and they order you all these little guys the little fingerlings that's a lot of tin foil that you're going to be wasting so i thought you know i have to think of another way to be able to cook these guys i'm throwing them into the oven they're staying hard on the inside or they'll dry out it just wasn't going well so i discovered another way and what that other way is is i'll put them onto a baking sheet and i use my silpat baking sheet um it's just a silicon sheet that you can get on amazon for like 12 bucks and i'll line them on the sheet and then i take a pyrex bowl just any oven safe glass bowl and flip it on top of the potatoes so let's say you know this is where all my potatoes are lined up i just take this and i put it on top like this and it's going to give a steaming effect to the potatoes and it's what's going to allow the potatoes to be cooked on the inside because that was the issue they were just so dense that the heat couldn't penetrate the middle so i put those in the oven and i put them in the oven for about an hour and a half and then i take them out of the oven or turn the oven off and just let them sit and i really think that the key to these guys is that you've got to let them sit you've got to put them in the fridge otherwise they'll still have that dryness to them please do not try to microwave these you can that you know they can be cooked that way but if you microwave them raw they really dry out it's not you know it's really not worth it um so yeah i ordered those online i've never seen them in person at a market i get them from hawaii veggie farm.com that's where i order them online and they get delivered straight to your door it's fantastic so that's where i get these guys so again 375 in the oven on silpat with a pyrex bowl over them and i put them into the oven for about an hour and a half take them out put them in the fridge or just let them sit and i'm not sure i've mentioned yet but all of these they gotta be paired with cinnamon in my eyes um if you are a big chocolate person then perhaps you could put some cocoa powder or cacao um you know that is a stimulant there is a little bit of caffeine in there so if you're sensitive to that perhaps don't do it at night because then you might be up the whole night um but it is a delicious way to to top off the sweet potato aj any words of wisdom about the the hawaiians i love them you know you do have to order them through the mail which you know some people don't want to do but sometimes again if you look at those ethnic markets i have seen them there some people won't eat them at me because they're not quote organic because in order to be shipped from hawaii to the mainland they have to i don't know is it irradiate them or something so some people aren't comfortable with that the best thing is to go to hawaii because they're everywhere every every every store sells those it's like them it's very common and that's what i love about hawaii and that's why i'd like to live there just tell you that i hear yeah with uh out with dr hawk that's a good reason for you to go visit her um beautiful so yes oh and if you are concerned about organic when it comes to potatoes what's great about potatoes is that they have such a thick skin that if you are only able to get the conventional ones i get the conventional ones i don't buy organic although i think to be honest the ones from whole foods i think that they are organic just that's the ones that they have i don't seek out organic ones if you are nervous about organic because the the skin is so thick you can peel off the skin and it's unlikely that the pesticides have penetrated to the inside of the potato so um if you want to give these a shot you can peel them so that you don't get whatever it is that they spray on them all right moving on to one of my favorites of all time the gold potato the yellow potato and as you can see i have all my yellow potatoes sitting in water and i'm gonna drain them out right now and put them into the strainer all right so i've taken my gold potatoes and i've put them into the strainer because they've been resting in water and they're going to go into my airfryer what kind of airfryer do you have the this is the can you believe i don't have a breville you know me of all people doesn't have a gravel but i i've had a lot of different types of airfryers and i really only make potato fries in them i don't really put anything else in them so this one does the trick but you know do you think is the gruffle really is it a big game changer in comparison to the other okay well i can see that you have room for it to the right of your oven it's what it what the breville does is it allows you to cook more than just one serving so if it's just you making it those those smaller ones are great but what's nice is because i live in the desert where it's very hot the breville it preheats faster than the oven and it doesn't heat up my whole house the way the oven does and also does other things it's a toaster it can it can dehydrate so i love it you know i know it's expensive it's like 400 well you know what in massachusetts maybe i should keep using the oven because it's freezing here um but i hear you that the the tough thing about the air fryer is that you can only cook so much um so i am doing you know like three years or three or so shifts uh to get enough and you might want the breville because some people put three trays in i only do two so you can you can cook quite a bit at one time so i like it for that reason also what i like about it is i get really busy sometimes and i burn things in my regular oven and i haven't heard the timer but the breville whatever you sent it to it literally shuts itself off kind of like an instant pot so that's kind of cool oh well maybe you know my birthday's next month maybe i'll send this broadcast to my boyfriend and say you think of any birthday gift ideas 25 off at bed bath and beyond i know people say the coupon says you can't use the coupon for the breville but you can i bought one for myself and one for a gift and in the store they've taken the coupon you know they are so nice there i swear you could bring a coupon from six years ago and they would accept it bed bath and beyond they really are nice people so that's a great tip and that's a hundred bucks you know and william sonoma if you're willing to open up a credit card which you don't necessarily have to use they'll give you 25 off too so there's ways to save on the breville and sometimes the breville even puts themselves on sale so you just have to kind of look you know it is an investment in yourself ultimately you know it's you buy the breville now where you have medical bills down the line so you have one of those little bags where you can quickly cook the potato in the microwave i do have one of those and it's for emergencies and it's for traveling um whenever i travel i bring it with me so that you know if i need to throw some potatoes into the microwave the only thing is that it does dry it out a little bit which i know some people enjoy but i like my potatoes nice and moist yep but like you say what i like about it is it just keeps them warm so i'll use it just as a warming bag there's an idea i like that one i'm gonna recommend that that's a great idea um beautiful so and those are bed bath and beyond like five bucks for one of those potato express bags so yeah absolutely um all right beautiful so the reason why i'm using the gold potatoes for the fries is that they're nice and creamy and what i did as well is i put the i cut them up and then i put them as you as you saw they were sitting in a bowl of water this is a tip that came from my brother and he has a lot of culinary expertise and he said something along the lines of it pulls off the excess starch and what this means is that when you cook it it's not going to be a scenario where you know sometimes you put something in the air fryer and it's not cooked on the inside and it sort of snaps it's just kind of a it's not so great but by putting it into the water it absorbs a lot of the water so that when you cook it it's nice and moist on the inside so with the gold potatoes what i've done is i chopped them up into fries i put them into the nice big bowl of water and you can let that sit overnight i wouldn't go let it go any longer than that but um this is a hack that i used when when i was a teacher and i mean the hours of a teacher are ridiculous i would cut my potatoes before school i would put them in the bowl of water and then when i got home from school all i had to do was drain it and throw it in the airfryer so that's a great system to get yourself into if when you get home from work you're like i just can't be bothered to chop everything up so that's what i would do i find that sometimes when you soak them they actually get crispier i found that as well um because i was doing some experiments this week to prepare myself for this and that definitely is the case so with that being said if you do have them soak in water you're going to want to keep more of an eye on them in the air fryer to make sure that they don't burn so i put them into the air fryer and i just press the chips button and what the chips button does is 400 for 25 minutes i do find that sometimes that's a little bit too long and 20 minutes does the trick also if you do let it sit in the air fryer if you don't open it up they can get a little bit soggy so make sure that once the air fryer goes off you you open it up and don't let it humidify um you gotta let it dehumidified so that's what i do for my potato fries now if you don't have an air fryer i wanted to present another way to make fries that is uh zero waste so the other way um and you saw i pulled these out of the oven is using a silpat and a baking sheet and these are actually the russets um the russets are great for using a silpat and putting in the oven so this is so easy because you don't have to flip them when you use this method so this method oven was at 375. 375 has been the name of the game it's been what i've cooked every single potato at so i put the oven to 375 and put the russets straight on the sill pad this is one of those fancy sill packs that's you know made in france my mom gave it to me um but like i said you can get them on amazon i think i saw him for like 12 bucks and you know it could be at your door tomorrow if you have crime all you do is cut up your russets so everybody knows what a classic russet is the nice white starchy potato and put it on the sill pad put it in the oven at 375 for 35 minutes and that is all you do it is so easy you do not have to flip them you don't have to take them out halfway just put it in there for 35 minutes and you're good and so we have our beautiful and they they do get crispy and you know i don't know if leprechauns go in there and and fix it up but they're crispy on both sides so as you can see you know it looks like they've been in the airfryer um so if you don't have an air fryer that is a zero waste way to cook yourself some potato fries so yeah that's everything those are all my potatoes yeah they have this thing called like um it's a it's it's i think it's called a crisp ease tray for people that don't have air fryers where it kind of has the tray kind of with the holes that they can use to cook in their oven and i had one a long time ago it seems to work pretty well yeah and then uh another thing you could do is i got this as a gift for my uh brother's girlfriend is i got her the crisp lid for the instant pot so if you have an instant pot you can buy a crisp lid which makes the instant pot turn into an air fryer and she said that it's tremendous i don't have one myself but i've heard that that's another great option too yeah so your program is called slim on starch how can eating starch make us slim well i you know i've been lying to you this whole time they had to roll me in here i've gotten so big on starch um but you know if you if you're a viewer of chef aj then you know that starch is so necessary when it comes to a whole foods plant-based diet because what starch is is it's the perfect matrimony between calorie density and satiety so things like potatoes what are these 400 calories per pound you know rice 500 600 calories per pound if you're trying to just do this whole foods plant-based diet on vegetables and fruits alone it's not going to work out it's just way too low in calorie density we have to have the starch in there because from a molecular standpoint it's a complex carbohydrate it's a long chain polysaccharide so you're actually going to feel full and satisfied and then from the calorie density standpoint it's so low in calories that you're able to fill up feel satisfied and satiated as the hours go on and you haven't eaten that many calories because at the end of the day you know a lot of people like to believe that there's magical food like potatoes are the magical food you can eat you know 5 000 pounds of them and you won't gain weight or bananas are the magical food you can just eat bananas and you won't gain weight but at the end of the day it does come down to how many calories you're eating um you know you could lose weight on twinkies if you only eat two twinkies a day but that's not sustainable so what starch is is it's sustainable and it allows you to eat in abundance while not eating too many calories but feeling energized and satiated and fall that's great and yeah and for like i if somebody really didn't want to eat potatoes there's other starches there's beans there's grains there's the winter squashes i know you're you're a big fan of the winter squashes aren't you yes you know it's kind of an abusive relationship i have with the kabocha squash because it is so it is so hit or miss i mean aj talk about hit or miss it's the kabocha but i can't offer some tips if you do want to have a good promotion squash the uglier it is on the outside the more beautiful and delicious it is on the inside so the same thing for watermelon the uglier it is sometimes the sweeter it is yeah so if you if you are looking for a good kubota squash you want it to be heavy you want to pick it up and say whoa that's a lot heavier than it looks if you pick it up and it feels light that's no good um and you want you want it to have a big nice spot on it the color of the spot on the outside you know kabocha squash is green the color of the spot on the outside is indicative of the color on the inside so if it has sort of a yellowish spot then it's going to be yellow on the inside you don't want that but if it's this nice deep orange on the outside then it's going to be this nice deep orange on the inside too and the deeper the color the more tasty it is i found that this year at least where i live the kabocha squashes are so tiny i used to be able to get these giant ones like eight pounds and now they're just snively little squashes oh i know so people are asking what you put on your potatoes is cinnamon the only condiment sure so cinnamon always goes on the sweet potato that's a non-negotiable it's a sad day if i don't have my cinnamon as far as these potatoes my favorite way to eat them when i make the potato fries is to wrap them in lettuce because when you do that the lettuce is watery and crunchy in comparison to the warm potato it's just absolutely delicious now what i want to say is that just because i do that and i don't put on salt or ketchup or anything like that doesn't mean that you should do that as dr mcdougall says whatever is going to get you to eat the food do that you know so long as you're not putting oil or any animal products on um so you know dylan and he has your well-year rolled sauces those are terrific he has the ketchup he has the barbecue sauce those are awesome if you want to put a little bit of salt on the surface of the food be my guest but once you've been eating this way aj you know this once you've been eating this way for such a long time you have a different set of taste buds than you once had if 15 year old me were eating this it wouldn't go very well but at 25 having eaten you know eating this diet for six years your taste buds adjust to it nice somebody's saying what do you do when you get those green those like green spots on your potatoes maybe those are the eyes growing any advice for eyes so two separate things here if the potato is green don't eat it that is you know you should not eat if the potato is green um that could be dangerous don't ask me why i just know that you shouldn't so if there's green on the outside that is a no good potato and it could be even dangerous to eat it if there are the eyes on it and it gets the spuds that's okay you can just pick off the spuds and once they've been taken off they're okay to cook but if you want to make sure that you don't get the spuds on there in the first place the reason why they might be sprouting is because they're probably being stored with onions onions give off a gas that makes the potatoes sprout so don't store your onions with your potatoes instead store your potatoes with apples because apples actually give off a gas that it prevents the potatoes from rotting and from sprouting so i know a lot of people i don't know why people always store their potatoes with their onions but my dad has been doing it and you know 62 years old i'm not going to tell them to do any differently but my dad always does it and i just see it and i go you want to stop doing that wow do you have a special kind of cinnamon you like or any cinnamon will do i buy my cinnamon from the dollar store because it's a dollar nice so alice says when cooking big batches of potato do you refrigerate first and then freeze or do you put them directly in the freezer that's a great question so with the hawaiians i really don't want the hawaiians to go bad because it's like christmas when they finally come the box shows up to my door and i get 20 pounds at once those ones are definitely gonna go in the freezer but the ones where i could just run to the store and get more i can just go to trader joe's and get more of the japanese those ones i'll just put in the fridge so really it just comes down to how many potatoes you're eating and how accessible they are to you if they're not that accessible then you're going to want to utilize the freezer but if you're able to get them on a regular basis then just put them in the fridge i wouldn't keep them in the fridge for more than three days though after three days your your roll in the dice in terms of the bacteria that can be forming right we have a nice comment that you're so petite and cute oh thank you yeah does it bother you when people comment on your appearance either one way or the other you know i it's a lot of projection whenever somebody's making a comment about somebody else's appearance because they want the spotlight to be taken off themselves um and there's this great kurt cobain saying you know everyone laughs at me because i'm different i laugh at them because they're all the same so at the end of the day um you know we just got to embrace who we are be proud of who we are be secure with who we are and as i said earlier in the broadcast it's the most attractive thing to be completely confident and secure in who you are and i'm sure you've heard the plant-based doctors talk about before that we have a very skewed idea of what normal looks like because two out of three people are are not in bodies that would promote health um so we're just so used to seeing that you know what's funny aj is my dad was overweight his entire life his whole life and then at 55 years old when he went on a starch-based diet he finally got down to a healthy bmi and he was you know unrecognizable and people would go oh my god you look way too thin his mom would say timmy you look sick um but his bmi was 24.9 he was barely in there but in comparison to the 250 pound old him it looked different yeah it's it's so interesting because i lived my life as an obese person for 52 years and a slender person only for eight and it's funny because people that meet me now nobody ever comes up and says oh my god you're so thin you know i mean that's never happened but people didn't but but in comparison it's like you know what i'm saying is like right and you know what else you know what we look like is the least interesting thing about us and we can train people how to talk to us um so if somebody makes a comment about your appearance instead of making a comment about their appearance or double doubling down on that make a comment about their energy and their mood or what it is that they do and so if somebody says oh my god you look so thin say do i look happy do i seem energetic you know and change the game toward that because like i said what we look like is the least interesting thing about us yeah it's so funny it just depends who who says it and how they do it if they say it in a snarky way i'll go well that's what i was going for so back to the potatoes deborah says is it okay to store potatoes in the fridge before cooking them that's a good question i don't see why you couldn't but i will tell you this oh i'm glad that deborah asked this great question because what you don't want to do is don't cut up your potato fries and then put them in the fridge if you cut them up and put them in the fridge raw they'll turn black and they'll rot i learned that one the hard way so if you're gonna put them in the fridge or freezer i really think your best bet is to make sure that they're cooked before they go in there so that's the one downside to potatoes is you can't pre-chop them and put them into the fridge that's why i had them soaking in water great well amber says i think healthy emmy is gorgeous kristen says she loves emmy got a lot of people watching that have had success on your program so you know that's wonderful denver says where do you store your fresh potatoes i have like a i don't know what it is it's from tupperware it's like this black thing with a cover and it's in the pantry i like to take them out of the bag um you know i have a bunch of these i'll show you just like any of these bags that you would buy them in but i like to take them out of the bag because they look nice and pretty in the pantry and i throw the bag out and i still wish i could find a way um to get them involved without buying plastic but it's not an option but i just put them right in the pantry and what you want to keep in mind is to have as few barriers as possible between you and the potato going in your mouth so believe it or not you know having the bag on the potatoes that's a barrier get as close as you can to having a beef fully cooked you know there was a study done in which they put grapes onto the counter after they had been washed and picked and they were nice in a bowl just in an open bowl on the counter and then they put a bag of grapes in the fridge and they said who's going to eat more grapes which household will eat more grapes and it was the of course where they were right on the counter right to be seen so putting this in the back of your pantry that's not going to do you any good you want to get as close as you can to this fully cooked potatoes hopefully in your fridge that you just put right in the microwave absolutely no barriers between the potato going in your mouth i love that i just think roasting really is the best way i mean i've cooked them in the instant pot and i love my instant pot but there's nothing like slow roasting them to give that caramelization well we know why aj it's because it's removing more of the water so you know it's it's the the amount of calories gets more and more and more dense when you put it in the oven as opposed to putting it keeping all the water in there but i'll take it it's way more delicious people are asking if you're going to have a master class this year oh very sweet um you know tell me what you want and i'll make it happen that's what i love about about what we do aj is we can do whatever we want it to be and what people say they need you know we'll make it so if somebody wants a master class tell me what you want it to look like and i'll make it nice well thank you for your the work you do in getting people not to be afraid to eat potatoes it's going to be a fun month so like i said i'm only eating potatoes this month and i think you know what i'll be eating the rest of the day um i bet you you're going to crave vegetables at the end of this yes for sure thank you so much aj i have so much respect for you oh my god well thank you you are adorable it was so nice getting to know you and thanks all of you for watching another episode of chef aj live please come back tomorrow we'll have another wonderful demonstration from a chef who's written many cookbooks her name is nava atlas and she's going to be concentrating on of all things proteins which is what dr mcdougall talked about today that we don't need more than three percent of our calories from thanks again emmy take care

Channel: CHEF AJ

Views: 47,559

Keywords: chef aj, chef aj live, chef aj recipe, weight loss, how to lose weight, weight loss recipes, vegan, vegan cooking, vegan lifestyle, vegan kitchen, healthy, health, nutrition, cooking, diet, plant based, plant based diet, author, podcast, food addiction, potatoes, how to cook potatoes, sweet potatoes, fried, salt free, vegan friendly, 2021, healthy emmie

Id: POAEPO4tI9E

Length: 58min 28sec (3508 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 08 2021