Mashed Potatoes With Garlic and Basil Recipe (2024)

FAQs

How to make chef quality mashed potatoes? ›

Soaking potatoes in water helps remove excess starch. Excess starch can inhibit the potatoes from cooking evenly as well as creating a gummy or sticky texture on the outside of your potatoes.

Sour cream adds a little bit of tangy flavor and a boost of richness to mashed potatoes. It's a fun change from the standard milk or cream and butter combo usually flavoring mashed taters. You can even try your hand at making homemade sour cream from heavy cream!

Mash potatoes with half-and-half or milk using a potato masher. Add in the cream cheese and smash until the cheese melts into the potatoes. Add chives or scallions. Season with salt and pepper, to your taste.

Instead of regular milk, pro chefs generally use a generous helping of buttermilk and plenty of half-and-half or (even better) heavy cream in their potatoes. If you think the bartenders up front are pouring heavy, they've got nothing on the cooks in the back who are in charge of the mashed potatoes.

When it comes to ridiculously creamy restaurant style mashed potatoes, there's not much to it. The secret is just loads of cream and butter. The creamier the mashed potato, the more cream and butter it has in it!

4 Tips From Martha's Mom for the Best Mashed Potatoes

Cook the potatoes just so, do not under or overcook them: the potatoes are done when you can slide a paring knife in with no resistance. Let the potatoes dry before mashing: Once they are boiled, drain and let them sit in the pan they cooked in for a minute or two.

The Best Mashed Potato Recipe In The World. With just four ingredients, Joel Robuchon's luxurious puree de pomme really brings the wow factor. Buttery mashed potatoes. Photo, Erik Putz.

Drop a whole russet into the pot and by the time the outside has cooked through, the inside will still be raw. Larger potatoes should be cubed to ensure they cook evenly (peeled first if desired). Smaller potatoes tend to have thin skins and can be boiled whole, no peeling required.

The secret ingredient is just ice-cold water.

You soak the potatoes in iced water before they are cooked. This eliminates much of the starches in the potatoes, resulting in a super light and fluffy mash. It's also like when you make rice.

Should you cover potatoes while boiling? ›

Place the pot over medium-high heat and bring to a boil. Once boiling, reduce the heat to a bare simmer. Do not cover. (Covering changes the environment in the pot and can make the potatoes turn mushy.)

Sour Cream: The sour cream helps keep the mashed potatoes fluffy. Cream Cheese: This adds a bit of creaminess without being too overpowering. Heavy Cream: Increases the creaminess and helps thin out the potatoes a bit.

The addition of a mildly acidic vinegar to a starchy veggie like potatoes not only deepens the flavor profile, but it also helps to tenderize the tubers.

The secret weapon, a good potato ricer (affiliate). This pushes the potatoes into strings, which helps them soak up every bit of the cream and achieve maximum fluffliness.

If you'd like to replicate his mouthwatering recipe, the chef used peeled Yukon Gold potatoes. He was sure to not rinse them too much as he wanted to keep the starch, explaining that the starch gives the mashed potatoes their depth and richness.

Adding egg yolks to a pot of mashed potatoes is an easy, dairy-free texture and taste upgrade that doesn't require any special techniques. The yolks harbor all the flavorful fats and emulsifying components and will thus effectively unify the fat and water in potatoes, translating to a smoother, uniformly creamy pot.

Potatoes, Dairy Blend (Milk, Butter [Cream, Salt], Soybean Oil, Salt, Natural Flavor, Monoglycerides), Water, Sour Cream (Cultured Cream, Food Starch-Modified, Sodium Citrate, Locust Bean Gum, Potassium Sorbate [Preservative], Carrageenan), Onions, Pasteurized Process Cheddar Cheese (Cheddar Cheese [Milk, Cheese ...