A single white ball rests on a wooden plate, looking like a quail egg and feeling almost as hard as a marble when poked with a fork. “Can you guess what it is,” asks our server, Josefina Escobar, at Hacienda Sarapampa, a family-owned estate in Peru’s Sacred Valley, the spiritual, agricultural and economic heartland of the Inca Empire (1438-1532). The estate’s farm-to-table restaurant stands in a 100-acre corn plantation close to the Urubamba river, surrounded by golden fields, mature trees and roaming baby alpacas. “Super potatoes” have high concentrations of iron and zinc, and some contain up to 10 times more antioxidants than blueberries and five times more vitamin C than citrus fruits. He is correct; perhaps it’s only fitting that an Irishman has a nose for potatoes, considering its place as a staple in his homeland.