We've been making mashed potatoes all wrong, apparently

A total game changer [Photo: Pexels]
A total game changer [Photo: Pexels]

The method for making mashed potatoes has always been pretty obvious – you boil potatoes in water, then you mash them.

But what you add to those mashed potatoes is another matter.

While most of us add butter, others dare to push the boat out by adding a splash of milk.

One chef, however, has turned everything on it’s head by suggesting we’ve been doing it wrong from the get go.

Food Network chef Tyler Florence has said that for truly creamy mashed potato, you should be boiling the taters in cream, butter and olive oil, not plain old water.

You won’t regret going to the trouble of adding herbs [Photo: Pexels]
You won’t regret going to the trouble of adding herbs [Photo: Pexels]

“Potatoes have a really delicate, beautiful minerality to their flavour profile, and when you cook potatoes in water and you pour that water down the drain, you’ve extracted all the flavour of the potato,” he told Popsugar.

“So what I do with mashed potatoes – because you finish them with cream and butter anyway, right? – is I’ll take that same cream and butter and add that to the potatoes and cook the potatoes in cream and butter.”

Besides a bit of seasoning – sage, rosemary, garlic and salt – Florence suggested we add peeled and chopped potatoes (obviously), cream, butter and olive oil to a pan, the cream just covering the potatoes.

Prepare to be delicious [Photo: Pexels]
Prepare to be delicious [Photo: Pexels]

Then cover the pan and let it simmer on a medium heat for around 20 minutes.

After this you want to make sure none of that creamy goodness gets wasted, so once the potatoes are done, put a bowl on the counter and a colander inside that bowl.

Then pour the mixture into it so the cream collects in the bottom, returning the potatoes to the pan for mashing.

Once mashed, fold that creamy mixture back into the potatoes to make what Florence calls “the best mashed potato you’ll ever taste in your entire life”.

And to be honest, it sounds like it could be.

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