Potatoes yield multiple profits. They attract chip manufacturers, restaurants, grocery stores, and home cooks. Their rich, starchy flavors add to any plate or snack, and their affluent history shows great feats in surviving famine.
Potato production continues to yield a consistent market demand, making it a profitable and worthy business. A major factor affecting potato production and its success is dry matter. Here is everything you need to know about dry matter and why it's important.
What Is Dry Matter?
Potato dry matter refers to the leftover substances remaining in potatoes after water removal. Many of those substances provide nutritional value and affect the quality of a potato. Most people use hydrometers to gauge dry-matter readings, calculating potatoes' underwater weight to find their content percentage. Dry matter gives people insight into a potato's nutrition and starch value, providing multiple uses in many fields.
Importance of Dry Matter
Since dry matter determines the contents of a potato, it plays an integral role in the potato's nutritional value, quality, and purpose. Dry matter percentages and ratings often determine the best consumers for the potatoes and how they'll get used. It determines how a potato can be cooked, whether it can be culled, and how it can be sold.
In cooking, certain potato dishes require a certain dry matter value in order to produce optimal results. Typically, a potato with a dry matter value on the higher end works best for frying. Dry matter also determines the quality, affecting how easily it can bruise. On average, potatoes' ideal dry matter percentage ranges from 20 to 25 percent.
How To Optimize Dry Matter
Various influences factor into a potato's dry matter rating. The most common factors include the potato's species, growing conditions, seasonality, location, and storage. Potatoes thrive and maintain optimal quality when stored in cool, dry, and dark places. The best storage method includes placing them in
paper potato bags and storing them in cellars after harvest. Growing potatoes under ideal conditions like cooler weather, during springtime, and in well-drained soils ensure the potato generates its maximum dry matter content and bears quality produce rich in nutrients.
Potatoes consist of two main parts: water and dry matter content. Dry matter affects a potato's worth and use, affecting how you profit as a farmer and seller. Understanding the importance of dry matter in potatoes allows you to maximize your potato production and optimize your stock.
