My favorite potato, available during the winter at farmers’ market, has been the pinto potato–red-skinned with blushes of beige and golden flesh within.  It bakes, boils, sautés well yielding an ultra-creamy texture.  Alas they’ve disappeared as a storage potato early last month at farmers’ markets.  Locally Goranson and Dandelion farms sold the potatoes until their winter stash was depleted.  They’ll be back in the markets by mid-summer.

By the end of May winter storage crops like potatoes, onions and carrots are truly getting long in the tooth.  The famous spring dug parsnip moreover is still not available at farmers’ markets. Farmers say that the ground is still too tough to dig them up.

“New” (?) potatoes from Hannaford

Concerning potatoes, a recipe, however, arrived in my Facebook page from Bon Appetit that sounded terrific: new potatoes boiled in white vinegar and water and then sautéed in butter until browned and finished off with a splash of vinegar.

I made the rounds at various supermarkets and other food stores to find the perfect potato. At the Portland farmer’s market a few vendors had some potatoes from last year, but they looked old and unappealing.

On another quest, I went to the IGA Pond Cove market in Cape Elizabeth to buy the only bleached cake flour available in Greater Portland.  All the other stores like Shaw’s and Hannaford have stopped carrying the classic box of bleached cake flour–brands like Swan’s Down (Reily Foods) and Soft as silk (Pillsbury), which according to baking guru Rose Levy Beranbaum is better for baking cakes and cookies.  She doesn’t specify a brand in her books, and I assume that she gets her bleached flour from professional sources.

Cake flour and Comet at IGA; the aisles at Market Basket

The boxed flours are no different from King Arthur in terms of its processing methods so all those looking for all-natural flours won’t find it boxed unless ordered from specialty baking suppliers.  I do get my all-purpose flour from a Southern granary.  But that’s another story.

Continuing my potato search, Hannaford offered meshed bags of potatoes that looked like new potatoes, small, round orbs, beige skin and gold fleshed.  At $2.99 for a 2-pound bag it seemed like a decent choice. They looked like spot-on new potatoes.

I boiled the potatoes, cut in half, according to the Bon Appetit recipe.  After 20 minutes at a moderate simmer, the potatoes were still not cooked: a knife pierced in the flesh did not go in easily.

By 30 minutes they were still not fully cooked.  I figured that once they were sautéed for about 5 minutes they’d soften up.

Wrong.  The were still tough and the flavor was off like spoiled milk or tasting as they’d been stored in a warehouse perfumed with camphor balls. I plan to return the potatoes to the store! Like an itinerant shopper I’ll lodge my complaint.

Leaders of the pack, Whole Foods and Hannaford

The bag had the Hannaford label with no other information as to origin. Hannaford has some local brands of potatoes.  But at this time of year they’re not freshly dug.  New potatoes won’t be available here until mid-June at the earliest if they’re farmed in high tunnels in the field under hoop-house covers. It’s going to be a longer wait for spring and summer vegetables this year because of the stubbornly cool spring weather.

Supermarkets—long the mainstay of finding every product imaginable on a year-round basis—are getting more particular with their product offerings.  If it’s not selling well—and this includes national brands that we’re use to seeing—they get the heave ho.

Did you know that Comet or Ajax are no longer available at Hannaford or Shaw’s?  Maine Hardware has them.

And products that we take for granted, like boxed cake flour, are off the shelves too, except for King Arthur’s blue box of unbleached cake flour.  I found mine, as mentioned previously, at the IGA where the manager said it’s not a big seller (Soft as Silk) but there’s still demand for the product.

Butter is another staple that’s hit or miss at various stores.  I did an exhaustive search for Land O Lakes brand of European style butter, which for a moment was available at Shaw’s.  According to the company’s website store locator there isn’t any store in all of Maine that carries the butter.

Various butters including the now hard- to- find Vermont Creamery and Cabot’s Butter 83 European Style (no longer available from Cabot); Casco Bay Butter is a relatively new butter, a small-batch variety–but look for the higher fat content butter, the best for baking

Whole Foods was one of the few stores that carried Vermont Creamery’s cultured butter, the log wrapped in gold and white packaging.  This is the absolute best butter to use in pound cakes, pastry dough or cookies that rely on great butter taste.  It’s a high-fat European style butter.

It’s gone from the shelves at Whole Foods who said that it’s discontinued.

Vermont Creamery was bought by Land O Lakes recently, but after a call to the company I learned that the butter is still made, but its distribution to grocery chains is spotty.  (According to their records Browne Trading sells it but I’ve not verified that yet. ) They were surprised to learn that Whole Foods stopped carrying the butter. Instead Whole Foods carries boxed sticks of Vermont Creamery butter,  it’s  cultured, and only available salted.  I’m not sure if it’s a high fat European style butter.

Supermarkets, including Whole Foods, favor stocking their shelves with house brands instead of offering national brands.

And Shaw’s still doesn’t carry bottled milk from Smiling Hill, a strange omission for a chain store straining to compete with other markets.

Even the more magnanimous Trader Joe’s stock a picadillo’s hash of products.  I don’t shop there often, though they have some products that I like: packaged nuts, Dijon style mustard, well-priced flowers and French butter from Brittany that’s high fat and cultured. Otherwise, the store has many product quirks.  Earlier this year, for instance, they stopped carrying the store brand of frozen shrimp toast— a great quickly made hors d’ oeuvre.  And for some unknown reason their brand of vanilla ice cream from a small-batch California creamery also bit the dust.  It was terrific ice cream.

Occasionally I go to the Portland Food Co-op but find the prices sky high.  However, they have the best selection of vegetables, mostly local and organic; but you pay dearly for them.  The rest of the store’s shelves have heavily marked-up products, which are offered elsewhere at better pricing.

Specialty markets such as Rosemont and the Farm Stand are in a class unto themselves. They strive to carry locally sourced products and some surprises too such as strawberries from Maryland that I found recently at Rosemont last week.  (They were good but not that sweet.)

Clockwise, Rosemont, The Farm Stand, Hannaford Yarmouth, Shaw’s Falmouth

A&C Grocery has a locally made ice cream called Dear Dairy that is some of the best ice cream I’ve had ever!  Its texture is amazing—utterly creamy and rich—and with enticing flavors.  This is small-batch ice- cream at its finest.

I shop at Micucci’s for Olive Oil (very well priced for pure Italian EVO), canned certified San Marzano tomatoes, double-rich tomato paste and the best selection of dried imported Italian pastas. And I look forward to shopping at the soon-to-open Steve Quartrucci’s  Monte’s Foods on outer Washington Avenue, which will be a haven for Roman style pizza, prepared foods from Quartrucci family recipes, and specialty market for gourmet grocery items.

Still, everything from Ajax to cake flour to butter has its vagaries of availability at our area stores.  I look forward to the opening of Market Basket in Westbrook, a chain that carries a great middle ground of well-priced products in all shapes, sizes and brands.