food

Apparently, the perfect mashed potato starts with how you boil the spuds.

Do try not to panic when I say that we’ve all been cooking mashed potato wrong. Like, really, really wrong. Okay, screw it. Panic all you want, it’s a travesty and good God nothing feels sacred or holy anymore.

According to US celebrity chef Tyler Florence, we’ve been making a number of serious mistakes with our universal spuds in a boiling pot method, starting with what we cook said potatoes in.

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 earlier this week, explaining that instead, he cooks his potatoes in cream or milk.

 

The potato hack set to teach your kids some manners. Post continues. 

“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.”

Filling the pot to cover the potatoes with a mixture of cream (or milk for the less daring), garlic, herbs, olive oil and salt, Florence says he leaves the potatoes to cook on simmer for around 20 minutes or until soft with a fork.

Once tender, Florence strains the potatoes from their creamy confines, only to re-add the rich, garlicky sauce as its mash liquid moments later.

“I put a bowl on the counter and a colander inside that bowl. I pour the potatoes through the colander, and the cream will collect on the bottom. Then I’ll put the potatoes back into the pot and take the potato-infused garlic cream and fold that back into the potatoes,” Florence explained.

“It’s the most incredible flavour profile. It’s the best mashed potato you’ll ever taste in your entire life.”

Oh trust us, we have no doubt it is. But how our nanas will take this change in tactic, we’re not yet sure.