Smooth potatoes from scratch

There is a secret to getting uncommonly

Smooth, creamy mashed potatoes — mash that isn't gummy or gluey at all.

And it has nothing to do with

Butter or cream or anything like that.

The secret is in how you heat the potatoes. I'm going to show you the way that I would do it, which is very simple. Then I'm gonna show you the way the molecular gastronomy crowd usually does it, which is a more involved process that yields a product I have mixed feelings about. But first, my way. This method works with any kind of potatoes, but here in North America we have these incredible. Yukon Gold potatoes. These are halfway between a waxy potato and a floury potato.

And they have thin, smooth skins that taste good so I do not peel them. But when I don't use Yukon Golds for mash, I try to use a combination of waxy and floury potatoes. But again, any potato works with this method. It does help to cut the potato into smaller chunks than you might normally use for mash. This method uses low heat so it takes longer, and you can speed things up a little by increasing the surface area. Some people do slices for this instead of chunks. Slices would work too. Throw those in a pot, and this doesn't make a huge difference, but you can wash the cut potatoes a little bit.

One thing that gives bad mash the properties of glue is free starch — starch that has fallen out of the individual potato cells. When we cut the potato we ruptured cells and some starch leaked out. You can wash it off, but according to my experiments this does not make a huge difference. Finally I'll fill the pot with water just to the very top of the potatoes. I like to use the cooking water in the final dish, and keeping the water to a minimum concentrates potato flavor in there. But that's also not essential to this method. Another thing not essential but good anyway is garlic. I'm just peeling a few cloves of garlic and then throwing them in to boil with the potatoes.

This is an extremely convenient way of getting garlic flavor into your mash, and the resulting garlic flavor is surprisingly smooth and mild. It's good especially if you're someone who doesn't like really bossy garlic. Now here's the trick — turn the heat on low, cover, and bring the pot to a temperature below a simmer. There might be some static foam on top but there should be no active bubbling at all, at least not for the first 10 or 20 minutes. The target temperature range is between 50 and 80 degrees Celsius, 122-176 Fahrenheit. Pre-cooking or blanching the potatoes at sub-simmering temperatures — this is the trick. I'm on a gas stove which can't hold super low temperatures, so after 20 minutes the heat just naturally builds up to an actual simmer, and that's fine. The first phase of cooking gelatinized the starch.

This second phase of cooking dissolves pectin and other bonds holding the potato together — makes it soft enough to mash. You need a hotter second cooking phase to soften up the potatoes, but it still works better if you do it at a simmer rather than a full boil. These took an hour, total, to get super fork tender, indicating they are ready to smash.

This is just my little trick.

I'm catching some of the boil water in a glass — my experiments indicate that water has more flavor than the milk you normally mix into mash, but it's not a huge difference. My favorite greenery to put in mash is green onions, very thinly sliced, but you could skip this, or use a fresh herb. Sage is really nice in mash. Butter — as much as you can justify to yourself.

I'll let that melt for a sec —my heat is still on low. I want to keep the mash hot enough to cook the onions a little but. A pinch of salt — I've found zero advantage to salting the boil water. If you salt at the end you can do it to taste. Pepper to taste. Sometimes I mash my mash with a masher, but generally I prefer to actually whip it with electric beaters. My mom did it this way. And if you do the low temperature blanching step, you can really get away with brutalizing the mash — it won't be very glue or pasty.

No matter what you do it, it'll just be smooth. The boiled garlic cloves in there mash up totally smooth as well, by the way. A little of my cooking water to loosen the texture. You could use milk instead. Onions in — toward the end so they don't overcook and before I actually eat. Give it a little taste. Needs a hair more salt, and if you want some extra dairy flavor, you can stir in powdered milk at the end — it's that simple. This gives you more dairy flavor than you'd get from normal milk plus we have the extra potato flavor from the boil water.

It's the best of all worlds. Alrighty, that's my mash, this is basically how I plan to make mash going forward — incredibly smooth, creamy, not sticky texture at all. But next I'll show you the more elaborate procedure that results in an even more dramatic effect. I first learned about it from noted molecular gastronomist Heston Blumenthal whose biography.

Ok, so these potatoes with garlic I've blanched just as before, nothing different — about 20 minutes at sub-simmering temperatures. The ideal range is apparently between 50 and 70 C. Drain, save the boil water if you want to. And then here's the extra step — cool them down. The fastest way to do that is with cool water. I'll just let that sit and continuously overflow for a minute, and I can feel when we've got most of the heat out of there. Drain thoroughly, and then I'll throw that in fridge for at least a half hour, enough time to allow some starch retrogradation. The science behind why this two-step cooking works is very complex and it's not fully understood.

I've linked an old literature review on this topic in the description if you want to read more. The mechanisms at play are multiple. But the effect seems to be starch that stays bottled up in the individual potato cells rather than starch that spills out into the mash. This second cooking we're doing at an actual simmer. This is mostly to dissolve the bonds between the cells so they all fall apart from each other. The effect works with or without the cooling step in the middle, but it is enhanced by the cooling step in the middle because science. Again, we don't fully know why. Ready to mash — butter in a bowl this time, because I'm going to use one of these things — a ricer.

I prefer the beaters, but this is a more gentle way to mash, gets us a less homogenous product. There's one of those beautiful, soft garlic cloves. Press the hot potatoes over the butter and the butter will melt. It's called a ricer because stuff comes out of it looking like little grains of rice, I guess. The one thing is that it acts like a filter and doesn't allow the skins through, which could be a bonus in your book. I used a heat-safe bowl so I can keep this over a flame. I want some heat in there to slightly cooking the green onions. Mash with green onions is known in Ireland as "champ," possibly from an old Scottish verb meaning to crush.

Nobody knows, but it's real good. Pinch of salt, a splash of my reserved boil water, or milk if you want. Pepper — people who care about aesthetics more than I do use white pepper. And again, this is pure bonus, but some powdered milk. You can put in a lot more than that — it hardly affects the texture at all. It just gets to a point where it's a little too sweet for me. And now I'm just gently stirring that with a spoon because I went through all the work of using the ricer. The ricer is about leaving the texture a little heterogeneous and also not bursting the individual potato cells, though the blanching and cooling steps have made that very unlikely.

The starch is all locked up in individual cells which is why this isn't gluey or pasty at all — to a fault, in my book. I actually think the version you get with the cooling step —I think this is too smooth and soft. To me it's reminiscent of instant mash made from dehydrated potato flakes — hardly surprising because those manufacturers use the same basic blanching and cooling process. I also notice a slightly less enjoyable taste. My hypothesis is that when all of the starch is bound up in the cells, less of it comes into contact with enzymes in your saliva that break the starch down into simpler sugar that you can taste before you swallow. That's just a guess on my part. But one thing I think enhances the flavor of any mash is a raw egg yolk on top. Ideally you do this when the mash is still steaming hot and then the yolk cooks slightly as you stir it in. Crazy delicious, though obviously it comes with some health risk, as all runny eggs do. Make your mash however you want, but try the basic technique — hold the potatoes at sub-simmering temperature for awhile before you do anything else, and you will be amazed by the difference...