A few years back, I assumed The One True Genius Mashed Potato Recipe was going to be the Jeffery Steingarten method of heating, then cooling, then heating the potatoes again, so that the starches have a chance to firm up and settle (or retrograde) in between, becoming impervious to gluey-ness. Everyone was talking about it.
Until I made them. And I knew that I would never make them again.
I never wanted to wait to boil potatoes twice for mashed potatoes. It's not that I resist work in the kitchen. It's because so many other kinds of mashed potatoes—riced, crushed with any number of silly looking tools, whipped with your grandma's vintage hand-mixer—are already great. Any improvements to the mashed potato experience were lost on me after the temperature-monitoring and pot-shuffling of this too-smart-for-its-own-good technique.
So when Diane Morgan, Beard Award-winning author of Roots and the forthcoming Salmon, among other cookbooks, wrote to me about a much simpler, much more under-the-radar mash trick of hers, inspired by a conversation with food scientist Shirley Corriher, my genius antennae perked up:
When making mashed potatoes, it is typical to see a recipe suggesting that the milk and butter be heated together, simmering the milk and at the same time melting the butter. That mixture gets added to the just-mashed, cooked potatoes. Easy enough, right? However, using the same quantity of milk and butter, but heating them separately and adding the melted butter first to the mashed potatoes, you end up with a butterier tasting potato dish. The fat absorbs into the cells of the potato, which have swelled and pulled apart from one another. Then, the milk loosens and flavors the potatoes.
So I tried a side-by-side test, adding the butter, then the milk vs. milk and butter in one pot, to see if I could detect a difference—and I could! The butter-first mash did taste more buttery and rich, despite identical ingredient lists.
I tried to justify this by wading through my food science manuals and phoning a friend, but couldn't find much other than admonitions about putting potatoes in food processors, which forces swollen starch granules to spill out of their cell walls and turn the mash to glue. (Has anyone of you ever actually done this? Everyone seems to think we're at extreme risk of succumbing to the temptation.)
But, aside from dirtying one more vessel (either a small pot or microwaveable anything), this falls under the banner of "why wouldn't you do it?" Unlike marching potatoes from boiling water to dry pot to boiling water, this requires virtually nothing of you to get a better result, and you get to feel that you have hacked the very molecules of the potato. And that's where you find the real genius.
| 4 | large russet potatoes (about 2 pounds total) |
| 1 | teaspoon fine sea salt |
| 3/4 | cup milk |
| 6 | tablespoons unsalted butter |
| Freshly ground pepper |
| 4 | large russet potatoes (about 2 pounds total) |
| 1 | teaspoon fine sea salt |
| 3/4 | cup milk |
| 6 | tablespoons unsalted butter |
| Freshly ground pepper |
Got a genius recipe to share—from a classic cookbook, an online source, or anywhere, really? Please send it my way (and tell me what's so smart about it) at [email protected].
Photos by Bobbi Lin
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Written by: Kristen Miglore
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49 Comments
It has always seemed like the logical way to do things. I don't want to waste butter, and potatoes are a variable product that might need more or less liquid to achieve the right consistency.
I also like to make lemon mashed potatoes by adding a little lemon zest and a splash of lemon olive oil - the best choice being Stone House Lisbon Lemon Olive Oil (Stone House is based in Berkeley California - they press the olives with whole lemons making the oil deliciously lemony). The lemon olive oil and zest add a subtle lemon accent to the mashed potatoes, which is great served with grilled meat or poultry.
Following the directions and with the Pate a Choux ready she instructed me to mix equal parts of the Gluey Potatoes with the Pate a Choux, in other words 50/50, and I did.
Once mixed I was instructed to heat vegetable oil to 375 degrees, handed two tablespoons and shown how to scoop and drop dollops of the mixed “batter” into the hot [375 degrees] oil. The croquette shaped (oval) dollops bobbed in the oil, puffed up and very quickly turned golden brown. Once removed from the oil and laid upon a cut open brown paper bag they were salted and allowed to cool to the touch.
Our instructor’s French training truly saved the night as the gobs of ghostly white glue turned out to be my most memorable lesson of seeing a pro keep her cool and turn a potential disaster into the most sought after dish of the evening. None remained when we finished dinner that night.
A local Cordon Bleu trained chef offered a French cooking class in her home years ago and I enrolled to check my understanding of what I’d self-taught myself from Julia Child’s books.
During the first night’s class a recently retired, newbie to cooking, male gentleman was given the task of preparing mashed potatoes. He peeled them, cut them to size, cooked them to softness, drain them, let them cool just a bit and then, becuz he’d seen his wife use her food processor at his home, filled the teacher’s processor to the brim. Lid on, unit on, and ever-so-quickly he successfully (sic) produced a container of glue.
When he proudly shows his handy work to our teacher she burst out in laughter and announced to the class “We’ve No Mash Potatoes tonight Class, Instead We’ll be having Potatoes Dauphine…”, and with that she handed me a cookbook and asked me to prepare a recipe of Pate a Choux.
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