The Wisconsin Gardener

cc Now that we know how good potatoes are for you we just have to eat more of them. So, we will. We are at Milwaukee Public Market. I'm with chef Peter Sandroni of La Merenda Restaurant a multiple award-winning restaurant where you serve tapas from all over the world using mostly local products. As much as we can. In this particular dish, there's a lot of local ingredients. We're going to do two dishes with local potatoes. Correct. So the first one is a classic Spanish called Patatas Bravas and Chorizo. We just start searing this guy. I'll flip it over and get it in the oven so it gets evenly cooked on the inside while we finish off the potatoes. The potato that we used is a russet potato that we got from Igl Farm, in Antigo, Wisconsin. Okay. At the restaurant, we pre-cook them. We pre-dice them, and we do what we call a medium dice and that's a specific size. So you peel them and dice them and you end up with that. We toss them in oil, salt and pepper we roast them in the oven, and then we cool them. When we get an order because we can't do all that all at once. You have to have some of it pre-prepared. We have been pre-sauteing this one right there they've got a nice color on them. We're ready to go. If you can pass me the two sauces that go with it. Okay. The red sauce is the brava sauce and this is aioli. Brava is Spanish for angry. So we're making angry potatoes. That's exactly what we're doing. Nice and spicy. We're going to hit this real quick to heat up the sauce and get these guys a nice even coat of the brava sauce. I'll get that out of the way. Give that a little even coat. Is this real spicy, or do the potatoes soak up the sauce? I feel it right now. There is a nice kick to it, and we can smell that. But it gets blended in well with the creamy potatoes. If you pass me a bowl, I'll plate this. Oh wow, we're ready that quick. This is how quick this goes. That's the beauty of this dish. I love how fast it goes. And we are going to plate that like such. We're missing something. Yes, aioli and chorizo. We're going to hit it with the aioli. This is exactly how it would be served in Spain. Does that lessen the heat, as well? It sure does, it's like a mayonnaise. You can buy a mayonnaise if you chose not to make an aioli. A little smoke this time. Yeah, a nice color on the chorizo there. We're going to slice that guy up. Hang onto that towel for me, please? Okay. At the restaurant, it's tapas and we want to encourage people to share everything so we kind of pre-slice this. That's the fun of that kind of restaurant where you get to taste a little bit of a lot. You can present it however you'd like at home. Oh, that's beautiful. This is how we present it at the restaurant. Okay, that's my potato healthy meal. You know, honestly, we roasted, we didn't fry. Kept a lot of the oil out of it. Well, and olive oil's good for you anyhow. Perfect. This one looks more decadent, but I'll eat it anyhow. This is potato, leek and pork tart. Okay. We are using three different potatoes for this one. We have German Butterball. The round one, okay. Corollas and Adirondack blue potatoes. All three of these came from Pinehold Garden in Oak Creek so really close to the restaurant. These are beautiful. We pre-sliced and roasted these in advance. I just want to quick show you how to use a mandolin because I know a lot of people don't like using them. Including me. Most people are afraid of the blade and go really slow. When you go slow, you get caught up on the blade. I tell people to practice. Make a bunch of stuff for your family. Get over the fear of losing a finger! Get over the fear, and you'll be able to go like this without even looking at it, while I talk to you. Okay, I'll let you do that! We pre-roast these guys. We plated them up and we're just going to do one more topping of the leek quark cream sauce. Okay, what is quark? Quark is a cheese that I tell everyone is very similar to ricotta. It has the mouth feel and the consistency of ricotta but instead of being finished with rennet which is what they use in most cheeses it gets finished with an acid so it's kind of got like a goat cheese-like kind of the after taste of the acidity that you get in goat cheese. But like ricotta, you can use it sweet or savory? Exactly. This is a local product for you? It's a local product. This is just three blocks away from the restaurant. Wow. It's just up the street from us. It's an urban creamery one of only three different creameries in America and was the only one for a while all by itself. It's right in the middle of Milwaukee. We throw this one in the oven. While this one bakes we're going to pull out the one we already did earlier. Boy, am I glad potatoes are good for us. You cook it for about 30-45 minutes. Everyone's oven is a little bit different. You want it to look kind of like a cheesecake. When you get that carmelization on the outside you know you're done. We will have all of these recipes on our website. If you think you missed something, don't worry about it. We'll have it there for you. These are mine! Peter, thank you. I'm so glad potatoes are good for us. My pleasure, thanks for having me.