There is a very common misconception that most or all vodka is made from potatoes. In reality it's a tiny fraction (I heard 1% at one point), while the rest is made mostly from grains (though some is from sugar byproducts, grapes, or even milk whey). I would love to know how this became the popular idea, but I don't think I'll be able to find out.
Interestingly, from my research the potato history books skim over the history of potatoes in vodka, and the vodka books do too. But I wanted to research when potatoes were used in vodka.
Potatoes didn't come to Europe from their native Peru until around the mid-1500s, yet the first printing of the word vodka is from 1405. Distillation preceded that by at least a couple centuries.
So the original vodka (which doesn't resemble today's crisp, clean version to be sure) was definitely not made from potatoes- grains and grapes had a big head start.
In Poland, "The late 18th century inaugurated the production of vodka from various unusual substances including even the carrot.[21]"
In Sweden, "Although initially a grain product, potatoes started to be used in the production in the late 18th century, and became dominant from the early 19th century.[28]"
According to the book Vodka: A Global History by Patricia Herlihy, "In the early nineteenth century, Poland introduced the plentiful potato as an alternative base ingredient…. Between 1843 and 1851 the European potato blight severely curtailed production."
According to Nicholas Faith and Ian Wisniewski in their 1997 book Classic Vodka, potatoes first came to Poland in 1683, it wasn't until after 1764 that they began transferred from the gardens of the rich to the food of the peasants.
According to the book The Vodka Companion: A Connoisseur's Guide by Desmond Begg, "Potatoes, a cheaper raw material than wheat at the time, were first used in distillation in the 1790s."
As we'll look at in closer detail in another post, Sweden and other Scandinavian countries underwent a long puritanical/temperance movement. As part of this, the government took control of all alcohol production. And it seems that because they thought of alcohol as evil (though sometimes a necessary one), they made it all with the then-lowest-quality ingredient they could find: potatoes.
According to Classic Vodka, "Potato vodka is still subject to a certain snobbery, as though it is a consolation spirit made in the bath-tub. This misconception can be traced back to a time when potatoes were the cheapest raw material for vodka, whereas today they are generally more expensive and labor-intensive than grain.
Karlsson's Note
The ideal potatoes for producing high quantities of raw alcohol would be large and have a high starch content, but Karlssson's vodka uses tiny heirloom varieties (seven of them) in their blend of Karlssson's Gold. These are less efficient, more expensive, and they certainly produce a flavorful spirit.
I'm doing a research project looking at potatoes, sponsored by Karlsson's Vodka.
Potatoes originally come from Peru, but they're only the 18th largest producers of the crop. China and India, which are relatively new producers of potatoes, are the top growers.
Then the US and Russia are nearly tied for third and fourth. I for one, am doing my share of potato-eating and drinking to keep America strong.
Not many potatoes are exported (less than 5% by one calculation); they're not much of a commodity crop.
According to FAOSTAT, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations- Statistics Division, the top potato-producing countries in 2012 were:
Though I know some Korean soju is distilled from potatoes, and after sweet potatoes regular potatoes are the most common Japanese shochu base ingredient, but I don't know if any Chinese or Indian beverages are made from potatoes.
Karlsson's Potato Vodka Facts
Sweden doesn't crack the top 20 potato-producing countries, but they sure grow potatoes there. In fact, if you search for "Swedish potatoes" you will find a ton of recipes, including something called Hasselback potatoes which looks amazing.
But the traditional summertime potatoes are called new potatoes aka fresh potatoes aka "färskpotatis" which sounds to me like "freshpotatoes" when spoken. The ripen in the summer and their skins are not mature so they slide right off. They are tiny and you eat them lightly boiled with dill and butter, though they're pretty buttery to start with.
It is from these heirloom potato varieties – seven of them- that Karlsson's vodka is distilled. They are distilled separately then blended together. They have also released two limited-edition, single-varietal vintage potato vodkas each with a widely different and robust character.
I visited Sweden a few years ago and wrote about how Karlsson's is made here.
Though the potato arrived in Europe in the late 1500s, it didn't catch on so quick. Partly this was because of the difference in terroir between northern Europe where the temperature and sunlight varies a lot over the year, and their native equatorial Peru. So they were grown around Europe but they weren't as prodigious as the potatoes we know today.
It was on the Canary Islands- closer to Peru than to Ireland in climate- that farmers were able to breed varieties that would later be successful throughout Europe.
There were also publicity issues – though as mentioned in the previous post they were often called aphrodisiacs, they were also believed to be the cause of leprosy. You win some, you lose some.
Potatoes were a different sort of crop than Europe's grains- they were more labor-intensive to plant (one doesn't just scatter seeds) and harvest. It really wasn't until the 1700s that potatoes became a food crop.
By 1700 the potato was grown around the UK, though this seems to be largely in individual gardens rather than as a field crop initially. They may have first been grown commercially in Alsace, France.
One interesting reason for their success as a food/field crop was wars in Europe: armies trampling over the lands wouldn't see the obvious grains sticking out of the ground, and they could camp on the lands and potatoes would still be growing underneath.
"Parmentier Antoine 1737-1813". Licensed under Public domain via Wikipedia Commons
Throughout the 1700s potatoes were eaten not by choice but out of desperation- but it turns out that their a pretty darn good source of nutrients. Frederick The Great of Prussia was a believer, and required their planting across the Germany-Austria region. A French pharmacist named Parmentier (there is a Parisian metro station named after him) was captured during the Seven Years War with Prussia was fed exclusively on potatoes for three years, and brought back this knowledge to France.
He introduced them to the royal court and there there were all-potato themed dinners. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson may have attended these dinners and at one of them Jefferson is said to have delighted in French fries and brought the idea back to America.
Potatoes were more rapidly accepted in the UK, where wheat didn't grow all that well but the tubers did. And as grain was a big commodity market, potatoes benefited from not being subject to market and weather whims. John Reader writes:
As a crop that thrived where wheat would not grow, and survived in weather that ruined grain harvests, the potato was to be welcomed by governments and commodity markets alike. Not only because it was a cheap source of food for the poor; not just as a commodity to be bought and sold; nor simply as a cushion that would dampen the severity of fluctuations in grain supply. It was all of these things, but also promised to free up more grain for the markets. If people could be persuaded to grown and eat more potatoes there would be more grain to sell. Thus the potato nudged grain away from its primary signicance as a stable food of the people who grew it, towards a formative role in national and world trade.
In Norway, potatoes were grown by priests who were often farmers. They even had the nickname 'potato priests'. Potatoes came relatively late to Scandanavia. They were grown in aristocrats' gardens in Sweden and Denmark in the 1730s and became a field crop around 1800. Around the same year, they were cultivated in Russia and the Ukraine.
The Potato Blight
Later in the 1900s, anthropologists were able to show that wherever the potato was adopted, populations increased. It was a proven source of nutrition and allowed more people to share space on land. Of course this came with a downside.
In 1845, 90 percent Ireland's 8.5 million person population was dependent on the potato for food, as it grew so well there. And in 1845 and 1846 the potato blight hit and 88 percent of the potato crops failed. From those years and for the next few after, one million people died and another million emigrated.
The world's first celebrity chef, Alexis Soyer, designed and implemented a soup kitchen that fed 26,000 people a day in Dublin. He was also the creator of the first-known blue drink called Soyer's Nectar, but that came later.
We call it the Irish Potato Famine, but that's not at all accurate: the same crop failure happened all over the world. In 1843 it ravaged crops in North America and soon came to Europe, destroying crops everywhere. The cause was a parasitic fungus that grew on potatoes.
The solution to the problem came from a botanist named Millardet, who was also instrumental in helping circumnavigate phylloxera by grafting European grapevines onto American rootstock. He also promoted the solution to "downy mildew" which was a problem for grapes as well as potato leaves. The solution, copper sulphate mixed with lime that is sprayed on the leaves of plants, became known as the Bordeaux Mixture and it is still used on crops today. (It's discovery is credited with starting the agro-chemical industry.)
But as that solution was discovered 40 years after the great blight, how did they stop the disease? They didn't. It was the luck of the weather and of the varieties planted. There were regional outbreaks for years until the Bordeaux Mixture became common. Luckily, none approaching the severity of 1846-47.
The Potato in the US
Potatoes were grown in the USA since the 1600s, but not so much as food. The transition happened when Scotch-Irish people came to the US, as well as subsequent waves of potato-growing peoples from eastern Europe and Scandanavia.
Potatoes arrived in the Colonies in 1621 when the Governor of Bermuda, Nathaniel Butler, sent two large cedar chests containing potatoes and other vegetables to Governor Francis Wyatt of Virginia at Jamestown. The first permanent potato patches in North America were established in 1719, most likely near Londonderry (Derry), NH, by Scotch-Irish immigrants. From there, the crop spread across the country.
Idaho, the present-day largest producer of potatoes, actually did not begin growing potatoes until 1836, when missionaries moved west in an effort to teach the native tribes to grow crops instead of relying upon hunting and gathering methods. However, it wasn’t until 1872 when the Russet Burbank variety was developed, that the Idaho potato industry began to flourish.
The Russet Potato
I love single-origin stories. The potato generally comes from a single place in the world, the Andes of Peru, but all of the Russet potatoes in existence come from a single plant.
One way to avoid potato blight was to cross-breed potatoes to see what happened. In this process, a New York preacher was sent some seedlings from South America and these grew very well and were named the Garnet Chile Potato.
Then a Vermont farmer bred these into the Early Rose, which became very popular. These potatoes were generally seedless, but in in 1872 in Massachusetts an amateur botanist spotted a seed on an Early Rose. He collected and germinated the seeds and a single one of these new plants produced great big potatoes.
He sold the rights to this new potato (apparently that's doable) to a seed company. Then this potato mutated into the Russet-Burbank potato aka the Idaho potato.
And that's where your French fries come from.
Karlsson's Vodka Potato Facts
Those great big Russet potatoes would be a lot easier to use to make vodka, but Karlsson's insead uses tiny heirloom potato varieties. They have less starch than the big potatoes and thus they need to use more of them – about 17 pounds of potatoes for every bottle of Karlsson's.
Read about a visit to see how Karlsson's is made here.
I'm researching potatoes in a little project for Karlsson's Vodka. Today we'll look at how the potato came to Europe.
As mentioned in the previous post, potatoes are native to the Andes mountains and over 3000 varieties are found there.
The Quechua people of the Andes invented a way to preserve potatoes: They would put them out at night when the temperatures were freezing, and covered them during the day. Then they were soaked in water and put out to freeze again. The next day they walked on the potatoes to squeeze out the water content, then spread them out to dehydrate in the sun. They had basically made dehydrated potato flakes like in your box of instant potatoes.
The first description of a potato by a European was published in 1601 from observing potato harvest in 1537. The author described them as a type of truffle. The first print reference to potatoes by name came from observations from another explorer around this same time.
Sir Francis Drake is often incorrectly credited with introducing the potato to Europe.
The first potatoes to reach Europe were brought by the Spanish by the 1570s, probably in the previous decade. They seem to have first been grown in Spain but were found in Germany, Italy, and Belgium by the late 1500s.
They were probably not first grown on the mainland, but on the Canary Islands off the coast of Spain – which is a pretty amazing point of entry for the potato to come to Europe, because that was the point of exit for the sugarcane that was taken to the New World by Columbus.
The potato slowly became a "plant of interest" around Europe according to the book Potato by John Reader. In 1596 they were described in one botany book, and in 1597 it was first illustrated by another botanist John Gerard.
Sweet potatoes were grown in Europe by the early 1600s and many accounts of potatoes confused regular and sweet potatoes – it makes for confusing research still.
Shakespeare refers to potatoes as aphrodisiacs around 1600; a common thought at the time.
In the next post we'll continue looking at potato history in Europe.
Karlsson's Vodka Potato Facts
The potatoes used in Karlsson's Vodka are called "new" or "virgin" potatoes. These are the first potatoes grown in the southwestern tip of Sweden that are harvested before their skin fully develops- when the plants are still flowering. They're considered a delicacy when the first ones are pulled from the ground; sort of the Beaujolais Nouveau of potatoes. I visited Sweden a few years ago and wrote about how Karlsson's is made here.
I have had a centrifuge sitting on my Amazon.com wish list for a couple years, just waiting for me to get tipsy and reckless enough to hit the one-click button. Well, I finally bought it last week not because I was wet with sauce but because I could no longer contain my curiousity.
Plus, I had just finished reading the preview copy of Dave Arnold's forthcoming book and wanted to play with some of the techniques. (I'll post a full book review later.)
The centrifuge I bought is one recommended by Arnold for experiments and travel, the Ample Scientific Champion E-33 centrifuge. The thing is about the size and shape of a rice cooker. It's adorable!
Note to bartenders: It's not really practical for commercial applications. The total liquid volume (if using all 8 of the 15ml test tubes that it can hold) is only 4 ounces. Enough to play around with; absolutely. Enough to make clarified lime juice for your bar program? No way.
But I'm not producing mass volumes and it costs less than a juicer so I picked one up.
Centrifuges are used to separate liquids by weight – the heavier stuff spins to the bottom of the tube.
If you've ever made tonic water syrup from cinchona tree bark, you know that it usually comes as a silty powder that is very hard to filter out of your solution. (My method for getting as little of the bark into syrup is to put it in the coffee maker with several filters.) Still, filter all you want and there will still be bark floating in the syrup, somewhat settling out of solution in your bottle.
It was the perfect thing to clarify as I knew there was a good chance for success. Rather than make my own syrup to clarify, I used Small Hand Foods' Yeoman Tonic Syrup, which was specially developed to pair with Beefeater gin.
The centrifuge has a 30-minute timer and a good amount of the bark came out of solution after one 30-minute cycle. But I put it back in for several more anyway.
What came out was a solution that was sparkly transparent but still colored. It tasted bitter and citrusy (Small Hand Foods tonic syrup is more citrusy that other brands) but much less barky than the original. I'll call that a success.
In the images below, the syrup on the left is un-centrifuged and on the right is centrifuged syrup. Note at the bottom of the test tube you can see the bark stacked up.
Perhaps next time I'll centrifuge boiled cinchona bark on its own- just in water rather than a syrup- to see what happens.
That will surely be one of zillions of future experiments with my new toy. Fun fun fun!
You can use the Cooler/Directional Freezing method to make blocks of perfectly clear ice. But those are big blocks and many people want to make clear ice balls.
Typical ice ball molds make ice that is cloudy in the middle. One reader developed a method to take advantage of directional freezing but it involves using a big pot of water so it's not space-efficient.
The natural next step was to use directional freezing in a small container with an ice ball mold sitting on top.
Thus, the water in the ice ball freezes first, then the cloudy parts are pushed into the water in the insulated container below it, which continues to freeze from the top down. All the water in the ice ball should remain clear.
I attempted this, ordering insulated mugs and coozies online, but never found one that was the right size. Thankfully, two Alcademics readers were able to find insulated containers that are just right- and send me pictures and answer all my questions. Awesomeness.
The hole in the mold must be pointed down at an angle. With the hole straight down, you end up with a clear ice "egg" instead.
I fill the cups to the brim and gently wedge the molds into the cup with a finger over the hole until the hole is under the water. Do this over the sink and the overflow runs down the drain. I keep as much water in the cup as possible, so there is water visible around the edge of the mold.
There is no problem getting the mold out of the cup. I usually give it 24 hours to freeze and there will be an inch or two usable puck of clear ice under the mold. I'll run a little tap water on the outside of the cup and around the inside edge to loosen up the belt of ice holding the mold in the cup. This doesn't crack the balls.
At 12 or 13 hours the sphere is only 80% frozen, but probably more clear than at the 24 hour point.
Update: In this post, I attempted and was successful at replicating this method. It works great!
Update: Mike Laine (see in comments below) found a smaller insulated mug to use: the Funtainer. This takes up less space in the freezer than the full-sized mug. He also poked a hole in the bottom of the ice ball mold for easier filling. See his post here.
Plastic Mug with a Stand
Reader James Carroll found another way that works. He found a plastic coffee mug. The ice ball mold sits on a smaller container inside the mug.
He found the plastic, 16-ounce mug at Walmart, but it is also here on the manufacturers website. The smaller container is a small Rubbermaid container that fits inside it.
Instructions:
Put container in mug. Fill mug and container with water up to the brim of mug.
Fill silicone sphere mold completely with water. Put your index finger on the fill hole of the mold, turn upside down, and plunge into the mug. Do this in the sink since the water in the mug will overflow.
So now you have the filled sphere mold sitting upside down on the filled container, inside the filled mug. If you freeze it like this, you will wind up with a clear egg. Because the freezing water around the sides of the mold will squeeze the mold out of shape.
To get an ice sphere, use a straw to suck out the water in the mug until the water level in the mug is just below the rim of the container.
Takes about 20-24 hours to fully freeze. You also get a cloudy big ice cube from the container.
Thank you so much Alcademics readers James Carroll and Doug Elder for being more diligent in solving the clear ice ball problem than I was!
An index of all the ice experiments including best successes and many failures is here.
I'm researching potatoes in a little project for Karlsson's Vodka. I've been interested in potatoes for a long time so this was the perfect excuse to learn more.
The potato is native to the Andes mountains in Peru, and was the most important crop of the Incas.
There are about 5,000 potato varieties worldwide. Three thousand of them are found in the Andes alone, and all potatoes came from this single place of origin.
What Is A Potato?
A potato is classified as a tuber. A sweet potato, on the other hand, is a root. The plants seem to have a lot in common (and the first few hundred years after they were discovered by Europeans there was a lot of confusion as to which potato was being discussed), but botanically they are quite different.
Potatoes are propagated vegetatitvely – growers don't plant seeds (that grow on poisonous cherry-tomato-like fruits above the surface in some varieties, if allowed to grow that long) but pieces of the plant itself.
According to Potato by John Reader, "A potato is a grotesquely swollen piece of stem and buds, broken off from a part of the plant's underground stems." The function of this is a back-up method of propagating, and growers take advantage of it, as replanting potato pieces produces clones of known species rather than genetically-mutatable new plants if the flowers are pollinated by insects.
Potato Nutrition
Nutritionally, a potato is nearly 80 percent water, then carbohydrates (mostly starch) and protein. It has a lower protein content compared with grains, though. In distillation of grains, distillers choose grains that are high in starch and low in protein, so this sounds like an advantage when it comes to making vodka from potatoes.
Potatoes are rich in Vitamin C and B complex vitamins, with "useful quantities" of calcium, iron, phosphorous, and potassium. You can look up the nutritional value of a potato using the USDA Nutrient Database.
Potatoes have a distinct top and bottom. Who knew?
Potatoes Used to be Poisonous
Wild potatoes are good at growing at high elevations (like the Andes) with not great weather, where grains wouldn't be successful. But their use as a food crop was not at all obvious. Potato plants evolved in regions with long dry seasons so the underground tuber was an energy storage unit to make it though the season. They even grow in regions where no perennial grasses can survive.
The tubers of wild varieties are small and bitter and can be poisonous, so nobody knows how and why they were first cultivated. This bitter, poisonous quality in potatoes comes from glycoalkaloids. It is believed this quality was reduced (something like 15-fold) by purposeful breeding of the plants.
One study found that one in region where the plants still had high levels of glycoalkaloids, natives would mix the potatoes with clay when eating them. A modern analysis of that clay showed it contained something that binds with glycoalkaloids to neutralize their effect, and because of that people could eat potatoes without getting sick.
First known illustration of the potato from 1597. This was drawn from potatoes in Poland. [source]
Potatoes Today
Potatoes are surprisingly adaptable: Today they are grown in 149 countries around the world, from latitudes 65 degrees north to 50 degrees south, from sea level to over 4000 meters.
The potato is the world's fourth-largest food crop, following rice, wheat, and corn (as of 2012. In 2008 it went corn, wheat, rice, potato.).
Karlsson's Vodka Fun Fact
This post is part of a series sponsored by Karlsson's Vodka, which is made from seven types of Swedish "new" potatoes grown in the sandy soils of Cape Bjare. I visited Cape Bjare a few years ago and wrote about how Karlsson's is made here.
The first time I ever heard of such a thing (besides around the rim of a Margarita glass) was from Duggan McDonnell of Cantina. That was probably four years ago.
Now it seems that everybody is in on the secret and is using salt in their cocktails – whether they tell you about it or not.
Check out the story on Details.com about how and why and where bartenders are using salt in their drinks.
Karlsson's Note
