bitter green potatoes?

So. Potatoes can turn green. Which is actually a sign of chlorophyll, but can correlate with production of solanine, a toxin that can make you sick or even kill you. Supposedly, a bitter toxin, with one page I found saying that if a potato was dangerous, you'd notice it from the taste.

Safeway often sells me bags of slightly-green potatoes (especially the red potatoes, green visible once cut), but I'd never noticed a taste. I decided to test it: I put out a potato in the sun for the past few weeks. It turned rather green even on the outside, and sprouted some eyes.

Just now, I tasted bits of it (without swallowing.) And... it tasted like potato. Even chewing a bit and rubbing on the rear of my tongue, I got nothing.

Wikipedia says "Chewing a small piece of the raw potato peel before cooking can help determine the level of solanine contained in the potato; bitterness indicates high glycoalkaloid content.[18] If the potato has more than 0.2 mg/g of solanine, an immediate burning sensation will develop in the mouth.[18]"

Yeah, no burn. I wonder if I lost out in the bitter genetics lottery and can't taste it.

Also, looking at the numbers, I don't know how the Irish lived on mostly potatoes without poisoning themselves. "The average potato has 0.075 mg solanine/g potato", "2 to 5 mg/kg of body weight is the likely toxic dose". So if you weigh 50 kg, toxicity at 100-250 mg consumption; two kg of potato would be 150 mg solanine, and possibly still not enough calories. I guess peeling would help, but it still feels like a tightrope act.

more bread

Made my fourth loaf of whole wheat sourdough today. After dipping into Flour Water Salt Yeast last night, I decided to try an extra long ferment. 1 cup flour, water, and starter, left overnight; then adding another cup of flour, water, salt, etc. letting that rise most of the day, and baked.

It still looks like it lost a war with gravity, but is still pleasantly spongy. Also, "etc." included two spoons of caraway seeds (sadly I don't recall if tablespoon or teaspoon), and now I can finally taste the caraway. I feel I achieved "actually tastes good" rather than "ambiguous but I keep eating it."

I'd also used a smaller amount of dill weed; not sure I can taste that. Does dill rye even use weed, or dill seed? ... seed, apparently. Hmm, don't have any of that.

Do I taste an effect from the long ferment? Can't tell, too many variables. I can say its spongier than the previous loaf.

(If you're thinking that 2 cups of flour isn't much bread, (a) I don't have a large mixing bowl and (b) if I'm going to be experimenting a lot, I want small experiments. Also, still kind of a low carb diet.)

In unrelated news, "not using Dawn dishsoap" continues to be a great move for not having stinky scrub pads.

In yet more unrelated news, Dreamwidth URL slugs ("fourth-bread") have to be unique, even though they're differentiated by date. What.