Your “Yukon Gold” Potatoes Probably Aren’t Yukons—Here’s Why

I didn’t expect to be investigating potatoes this fall. That’s until I started looking for Yukon Golds for a sheet-pan chicken recipe I was developing. This popular yellow-fleshed, Canadian-born variety is the potato I often default to because it’s thin-skinned, naturally creamy, and still manages to hold its structure when cooked. It’s also the recommended potato for many other Serious Eats recipes. But when I went to buy them, they were nowhere to be found in Brooklyn or Manhattan—not at the many mainstream grocery stores I tried, not at Whole Foods, not at specialty food stores.

I eventually resorted to Instacart, relieved to see Yukon Golds listed as available for delivery from several stores. The listings were clearly labeled “Yukon Gold,” so I ordered them—three times, from three different stores. And three times, completely different bags showed up: Golden Rush, Klondike Goldust, Yellow Gold—names I’d never seen before and initially assumed were knockoffs. After the third delivery, it stopped feeling like my own little potato conspiracy and more like something was actually going on with my beloved Yukons.

“I often look for Yukon Gold potatoes in grocery stores but almost never find them,” Dr. Gefu Wang-Pruski, a molecular biologist at Nova Scotia’s Dalhousie University who specializes in potato genetics, told me in an interview. And really—if a potato scientist can’t track down Yukon Golds, what hope do the rest of us mere mortals have?

What I eventually learned is that Yukon Golds aren’t just quietly disappearing—they’re being pushed aside. Growers across the US and Canada have largely stopped planting them, citing low yields, disease susceptibility, and poor storage performance. Meanwhile, a growing roster of European yellow-fleshed varieties has taken over fields and supermarket shelves. They’re more productive, resilient, and far more profitable. In reporting this story, I spoke with molecular scientists, breeders, retailers, and chefs to understand why the potato so many cooks rely on is losing ground, what’s replacing it, and whether Yukon Golds have a future in American kitchens at all.

What Are Yukon Gold Potatoes?

The Yukon Gold, named after a territory in northwestern Canada, was developed at the University of Guelph in Ontario, first bred in the late 1960s by potato breeder Gary Johnston, and officially released in 1980. It was created by crossing a North American white potato with a yellow-fleshed Peruvian variety, bringing the color and creaminess common in South American potatoes into the North American market for the first time.

Yellow-fleshed potatoes aren’t new—Europeans have cooked with them for generations, and South America has cultivated a wide range of yellow varieties for centuries. But in the United States and Canada, where white potatoes like russets dominated supermarket shelves for decades, the Yukon Gold was the first yellow potato to gain real traction. For many North American cooks, it was the first yellow-fleshed potato they ever encountered in a grocery store.

A true Yukon Gold is easy to recognize once you know what to look for: a small-to-medium, round-to-oval potato with thin, lightly netted skin and a deep yellow interior. Its most distinctive marker is the pale pink ring around the eyes—a soft blush caused by the plant pigments anthocyanins inherited from its Peruvian lineage.

What sets Yukon Golds apart from russets is their balance of starch and moisture. Unlike russets, which can turn chalky and crumbly when cooked, Yukons hold their shape in soups and braises, becoming tender without disintegrating. They’re also prized for dishes that rely on a creamy-but-cohesive texture—tortilla española, tartiflette, crispy roasted potatoes—where they deliver richness without turning dry.

That combination of flavor, texture, and versatility made them a favorite among home cooks and professionals alike.

Why Are Yukon Golds Disappearing?

The deeper I dug, the clearer the pattern became.

Yukon Golds are beloved in the kitchen but problematic in the field. “Low yield, sensitive to disease, and poor storage performance,” is how Wang-Pruski summarizes it.

The variety is also unusually prone to two major threats: common scab and potato virus Y, which causes significant crop losses. Both can undermine a harvest before it ever leaves the ground, Dr. Mark Clough, a potato researcher at North Carolina State University, told me.

Yukons are notorious for late-season defects too: rot, hollow heart, and internal necrosis. In the kitchen, they behave predictably. In the field, they rarely do.

Dr. David Douches, a potato breeder at Michigan State University, explains that Yukons “can be difficult to keep in storage without quality loss,” a major liability for farmers who depend on long-holding, consistent varieties. Even during the growing season, he told me, Yukons require a narrow band of conditions to avoid defects—hardly ideal in a climate increasingly defined by droughts, heat spikes, and unpredictable storms. Many of the issues consumers never see, he said, “are exactly the ones that make growers walk away.”

And outside agricultural circles, the shift has been strangely quiet. One of the few people to write about it was journalist Owen Roberts, who devoted a 2016 “Urban Cowboy” column in GuelphToday to the growing scarcity of Yukons in Ontario. But beyond that, the online conversation is remarkably thin. When I went looking, the most active discussion I found was a single Reddit thread from 2023 titled, “Where are all the Yukon Gold potatoes?” The replies were bewildered but resigned—some chimed in to complain they couldn’t find them anywhere, while others could find them but at exorbitant prices. 

For a recent Friendsgiving, Daniel, our editorial director, managed to find Yukon Golds at a local farmers market in New York—something I hadn’t been able to do for weeks. The win was short-lived: When he cut into them, several revealed a blackened hollow heart. And while it sounds like an excellent name for a heavy-metal band, it’s an actual physiological defect—an empty cavity that forms when the potato grows too quickly after a period of stress, often leaving a dark or blackened interior. It’s also exactly the kind of late-season problem growers cite when explaining why Yukons have become so unreliable.

What Comes Next for Yukon Gold and Its Kin?

The more I spoke with breeders and researchers, the clearer it became that the Yukon Gold doesn’t have an heir apparent. Instead, as noted above, it has been eclipsed by an entire wave of newer European yellow-fleshed potatoes—varieties that yield more, resist disease, store reliably, and still offer the creamy texture cooks love about Yukons.

Dr. Benoît Bizimungu, a potato breeder and research scientist at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, says his team developed a new yellow-fleshed variety called AAC Canada Gold-Dorée. This variety, which was licensed in 2017 in Canada and the US, was bred specifically to address the weaknesses that make Yukon Golds so difficult to grow. It produces higher yields, resists disease—including potato virus Y—and was designed to closely match the Yukon Gold’s flavor and texture. It’s mostly available as seed for now, he says, with early production happening in Canada and in limited acreage in Colorado. While it isn’t yet showing up in supermarkets, those first plantings suggest it may eventually become a real contender once it spreads beyond the seed stage.

Bizimungu adds that even if the Yukon Gold loses ground commercially, it remains valuable as breeding material. Its flavor, texture, and cooking quality make it a strong parent in new crosses, so researchers continue to preserve and use it in Canada’s national gene bank. Other breeders are moving in the same direction: using the Yukon Gold in conjunction with other varieties to try to create a super yellow potato. Douches said his team is developing new yellow-fleshed varieties that retain the Yukon’s cooking quality while addressing its agronomic flaws.

Dr. Walter De Jong, a potato breeder at Cornell University, pointed me to a national seed acreage data from the Potato Association of America showing that Yukon Gold plantings have undergone a steady decline since the early 2000s, while newer varieties like Gala already exceed Yukon in seed acreage and Soraya is close to or matching it in some years. In addition to Gala and Soraya, Agata, Colomba, Satina, Belmonda, and Natascha are among the European varieties replacing Yukons. That same decline in Yukon Gold planting is visible in Canada, too. Bizimungu notes that Yukon Golds once appeared reliably in the country’s annual list of the top 50 potato varieties by seeded acreage. In the last year or two, he says, it slipped off the list entirely.

NC State’s Clough went so far as to say that growers in North Carolina have “pretty well stopped raising Yukons” altogether, turning instead to varieties like Colomba, Soraya, Natascha, and Golden Globe. His observation reflects what other breeders and retailers described to me as well: Yukon Golds drifting into obsolescence, European yellows filling the gap, and stores gravitating toward whichever high-yield, disease-resistant varieties move most cleanly through the supply chain.

And while most American shoppers have never heard of any of these varieties, they’ve likely been eating them for years. As Douches explains, the US retail system almost never labels yellow potatoes by variety. If the skin is smooth and the flesh is yellow, it’s sold simply as “gold” or “yellow”—indicating a color category, not a cultivar. Which means a bag labeled “gold potatoes” may contain Colomba or Agata, even if the shopper assumes they’re getting “the Yukon kind,” as Douches puts it.

Retailers see the same pattern. Lauren Jangl, a representative for the New York–area online grocer FreshDirect, told me that customers rarely seek out Yukon Golds by name; they shop almost entirely by color. As long as a potato is labeled “gold,” it sells. That habit has real consequences behind the scenes, because true Yukon Golds cost more to produce, which translates into higher wholesale prices. When consumers treat all gold potatoes as interchangeable, Jangl explains, there’s little incentive for retailers to prioritize a variety that’s harder and more expensive to keep in stock when the European ones move just as quickly.

If this all sounds a little somber, I get it. The Yukon Gold earned its reputation: the potato for silky pommes purée, for buttery potato salad, for those creamy-centered, crisp-edged roasted pieces we all chase. Its slow death is worthy of a moment of silence—for the tuber we’ve leaned on for decades without ever imagining we’d have to replace it.

When I asked Jeremiah Stone, chef and co-owner of New York’s Wildair and Bar Contra, whether Yukon Golds ever show up on his menus, he told me he’s never relied on them. Stone prefers highlighting potatoes Americans encounter less often, like Chipperbec or Norwis, and sees no reason to narrow his options when so many excellent varieties exist. Supporting diversity in the potato supply, he said, is far more interesting than building dishes around a single standby.

For years, I was one of many recipe developers who insisted on Yukon Golds for certain dishes. But their disappearance has nudged a reset. The gold rush days of the Yukon may be over, but that doesn’t mean we’re without yellow potatoes. In fact, breeders in both the US and Canada are developing new yellow-fleshed lines that retain the Yukon’s beloved cooking qualities while avoiding its agronomic pitfalls, and many of the European varieties already replacing it—newer ones like Agata and Satina, as well as older standbys like Nicola—deliver excellent results in the kitchen. When I asked Stone whether he’d encountered the elusive Yukons recently, he answered honestly: “I haven’t thought too much about the Yukon.”