I only recently gained understanding that potatoes are not fungible. I always looked at the more expensive varieties of potatoes and thought people were just buying them for the color, and thought there was no way that they were worth the markup. But an incredibly hot piece of ass said "please daddy make me greasy French fries" so I bought a fry slicing machine and tried dozens of varieties of potatoes. Cherie are orders of magnitude better than anything else for fries. They are these red potatoes from France, and they make so much better fries that they might as well be a different species. They are almost as distant from normal fries as sweet potato fries are, but in a different direction.
Though now I think the Russet is a tasteless potato with the texture of hospital food, I have also through this process gained an appreciation for its constitution. It is likely to the limit of physics the most efficient conversion of energy to starch on the planet. It also has an incredible shelf life, lasting much longer in my root cellar than any other variety by multiple months. It is truly an expression of American Protestant spirit of industriousness, in that it is the perfect potato to grow at an absurd scale, turn into a slurry, flash freeze, and ship all across the planet for deep frying at the lowest price possible. I will never cook with this shit in my kitchen ever again, but now I look at it like I do a skyscraper. Not ever a place I'd want to live, but an incredible marvel of engineering and architecture that was manifested by the mind of the Anglo-American.
