Your Curry Deserves The Right Potato. Here's How To Choose

Curry is popular in many cuisines from Indian and Indonesian to Thai and Japanese. However, a few things remain consistent regardless of the country of origin — it is delicious, and it takes basic ingredients like potatoes, onion, and garlic and lifts them to spectacular heights of flavor. Those simple ingredients, however, can throw everything off if you don't pick the right ones to complement your dish. Curry and potatoes, for example, are a fantastic combination, whether you are making a flavor-packed chickpea and potato curry or simply using curry to elevate your basic potato soup.

But while potatoes might come across as an unassuming vegetable, they are quite far from simple. There are somewhere in the ballpark of 4,000 different known varieties representing a range of different characteristics like color, size, shape, and even how they are best cooked. Even among these varieties, there are even more subvarieties. And to break things down even further, there are three categories of potatoes: waxy, starchy, and all-purpose. This categorization is what determines which potatoes are best used for certain types of recipes, but how do you choose the best potato for your curry?

Choosing the right potato for your curry isn't as simple as buying what's on sale at the grocery store. There's a lot to unpack, from making sure they are safe to eat to understanding how the starch content affects the way they cook and taste. When it comes to a dish like mashed potatoes, for example, you want one with a good starch content, so you'll want to lean toward a russet, which will give your mash a light and fluffy texture.

But when it comes to curry, you want a potato that will hold up well and absorb the complex flavors of spices like garam masala and ingredients like onions and garlic that will build your curry. For this reason, it is best to avoid starchy potatoes and lean toward a waxy or all-purpose variety. Waxy potatoes have a low starch content and high water content, which gives them a firm flesh that holds its form during the cooking process rather than turning to mush, or more appropriately, mash. Red potatoes are a popular choice when it comes to recipes like curries that require potatoes to be chopped up and simmered with other ingredients.

All-purpose varieties, like Yukon Gold, can make a great choice for a curry because they fall somewhere in the middle between starchy potatoes and waxy potatoes and have medium levels of starch, sugar, and moisture. This allows them to hold their shape while they cook, something which is important in a curry where you want to feature the potato rather than have it turn to mush and disappear into the sauce, and it will still give you the light and fluffy texture of a starchy potato like a russet.