Row 7 Seed Company spent more than ten years on one potato, and nearly everyone who tastes it says the same thing. It tastes like roast chicken! No stock, no drippings, no seasoning. Just a potato, named Poulette, which is French for a young hen.
It went on sale this fall at about 60 Whole Foods stores in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, at $6 a bag. That’s the news. The better story is how it got there, because it starts with a chef talking about the potato his mother used to grow.
A favorite potato, remembered at dinner
In 2013, Dan Barber, the chef behind Blue Hill at Stone Barns, hosted a Seed Summit at Stone Barns in New York. Two of the guests ended up side by side. One was Michel Bras, the French chef from Laguiole whose gargouillou, a plate of dozens of tiny vegetables, herbs and flowers, has been copied in kitchens all over the world. The other was Walter De Jong, a potato breeder at Cornell whose father bred potatoes before him.
They talked about potatoes, of course. Bras told De Jong about his favorite, an old French variety called Institut de Beauvais. He loved how it tasted and how it cooked. He also loved it because his mother grew it.
De Jong went looking for it. He found it, and in early 2014 he crossed it with one of Cornell’s own breeding lines. The first seeds went into the ground the next year at the university’s research farm on Mount Pleasant, just outside Ithaca.
Ten years of tasting
Most potatoes are bred for yield, for shelf life, for the fryer. Barber has said he loves old potatoes and has little patience for modern ones like the Russet, which were picked for uniformity and storage rather than taste. His argument is that every heirloom was once a new variety that somebody chose. Row 7 just wants cooks in the room when the choosing happens. Barber founded the company in 2018 with Cornell breeder Michael Mazourek and seed grower Matthew Goldfarb, and its first hit, the Honeynut squash, began when Barber asked Mazourek for a butternut that actually tasted good.
Poulette spent years in the fields and kitchens of Row 7’s Trial Network, more than 150 chefs and farmers who grow new varieties, cook them and report back. The seed potatoes are grown organically in New York, and the ones in the bag come from organic farms including Red Hill Farms in Pennsylvania and Norwich Meadows Farm in New York. Barber says it crops generously for organic growers too, which matters as much as flavor if a potato is going to last.
Every fall, De Jong’s team walked the plots and decided which seedlings earned another year. The plots grew and the cut got harsher. A survivor had to look good, carry the right starch, resist pests and disease, mature on time and yield well. Only then came the last test, flavor, and the breeders handed that one to Barber’s kitchen. It was the cooks who said this potato was special.
So why chicken?
Nobody knows! Barber told Food & Wine he wishes they did. The first time they tasted it, everyone at the table said the same thing, and in his words, “the name more or less picked itself.”
Row 7 describes the flavor as savory, nutty and deeply roasted, with a texture that’s creamy but a little floury, which is what you want for baking, frying and mash. Whether you’ll taste the chicken is another matter. Of the first two reviews on Row 7’s own site, one praised the earthy flavor after a round of hasselback potatoes and leek soup. The other baked it, mashed it and never found the chicken at all. We like that they left that one up.
The bag tells you what to do
Potato packaging is usually a mesh sack and a farm name. Row 7’s bag is closer to a book jacket. It’s a deep cobalt blue with a hand-painted wordmark and three words under the name: rich, savory, roasty. A photograph of the potatoes already baked sits right beside a mesh window showing them raw, so you get the before and the after in one glance.
It does the job a good market vendor would do, telling you what this potato is for. Bake it, split it, add a spoonful of sour cream. Every photo Row 7 has put out says the same thing.
How to cook it
Barber’s advice is to keep the first one simple. Bake it or roast it, which is where his cooks swear the chicken comes through. After that, he says, it makes the silkiest puree he’s ever had, and it can stand in anywhere you’d reach for a Russet.
The best idea closes a circle. Poulette has just the right starch for pommes aligot, the potato and cheese puree from France’s Aubrac, beaten with garlic until it stretches off the spoon in long ribbons. The Aubrac is where Michel Bras made his name. His mother’s favorite potato crossed an ocean, spent ten years in the dirt in upstate New York, and can now go home to his region’s signature dish!
Where to find it
For now, Poulette is a Northeast potato. Bags are in about 60 Whole Foods stores in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut from September through March, and then it’s gone until next fall. Row 7’s Upstate Abundance, another De Jong potato, started in the same small corner before it spread to more stores, so the rest of us are hoping this one travels too. Row 7 says plenty more is on the way. It now works with more than 50 plant breeders and chefs around the country.
Potatoes keep surprising us. They’ve been turned into milk, and into chips that cost $15 apiece. A potato that tastes like dinner might be the best trick yet. If you find a bag before Thanksgiving, roast it with a good pinch of salt. Then tell us about the chicken.
