How to Make Perfect Mashed Potatoes

Featured Pro: Curtis Stone
Category: Cooking
Time: 4:27


CURTIS STONE: Hey, I’m Curtis Stone, and here’s another great GMC Trade Secret for you.

Potatoes are one of my favorite staple foods. And everybody can make the perfect mashed potatoes if you just follow a couple of really easy steps. Come on. I’m going to show you how.

Now, to get those mashed potatoes beautiful and creamy, there’s a little bit you need to know about the selection of your potato. I’ve got three different types here – russets, Yukon golds and redskins.

Now, the russets are my favorite, because they’re beautiful and creamy. They’re a really nice, fluffy potato. Yukon golds are also great. The redskins are probably more for roasting or frying. So go for one of these two.

All right, the next thing you want to know is cook them - just cut them up into chunks, right. Cook them just until a knife goes in and the potato falls back off. So that’s cooked. But you don’t want to cook them any further than that or they’re going to take on too much water. So once you get them to that point, bring your pot over to the sink and just strain all that water off.

Now, once the water’s strained off – and this is a really important step – keep the hot pan. Pick up your potatoes and pop them back on that hot pan, and that steam is going to help let them dry. So you can just leave them for a minute or two, and that beautiful steam is going to help to dry out the potatoes so, again, they don’t become watery.

The next thing you need to do is pick up your instrument. Now, which one you choose is up to you. I love this. It’s called a potato ricer, and it’s a big mama, so you can fit plenty in there and squeeze it through so it doesn’t take all day. You can also use this. It’s called a food mill, which is a little bit fancy. And you sort of – you move it around there and it squashes the potatoes through the bottom, so the same kind of concept. And, of course, you can go for the traditional.

Now, this is never going to get it as fine. You’re going to have little chunks in there. But that’s not the end of the world. For me, it’s the ricer. Okay, so I pick my ricer, get a couple of the dried potatoes that have been steaming, and then a little chunk of butter. You throw that in; a couple more of the potatoes. And then you squeeze it through. And you’ll see that butter melts as the heat of the potatoes is squeezed through the ricer. Beautiful. Delicious, delicious, delicious. So you repeat that until all your potatoes are through and you’ve got a good amount of butter into your mash. Yum.

Okay. So now, while it’s still nice and warm, we can get rid of that. I bring over the next ingredient, which is our hot milk. Now, I use hot milk because hot things will blend together better when they’re at the same temperature, just as cold things will. So over here, get yourself a little spoon. Give this a scrape together and just bring it all together.

Okay, I actually swap out my spatula at this point for a whisk, because I want to get it super-smooth. So I pour a little bit of the hot milk in, and then I just give it a whisk. Now, you can season it. You can put any sort of flavors you want, so you can put some mustard or some herbs or some spice. I’m going to leave these nice and plain and just give it a good whisk around. Look at those super-smooth mashed potatoes – beautiful. You get the lovely buttery flavor because we put a little bit of butter in.

I’m going to season it with just a little bit of salt, because I’ve already put a little bit of salt into my water, and some fresh cracked pepper. And then, once you’ve sort of incorporated some of that milk in, then you can get a bit of the elbow grease going and give it a good whisk. Beautiful. Your guests aren’t going to know what hit them when you get beautiful mashed potatoes. When you get them just right, they’re pretty incredible.

Now, if you wanted them wetter, you’d put more milk. If you want to keep them nice and dry like this, like I do, then you leave them just like that. Grab yourself your serving bowl, and then you just literally scrape all those beautiful creamy potatoes straight into your bowl. And then I’m going to serve it with a little butter that I prepared earlier. As if there wasn’t enough butter already, I’ve got here a parsley butter that I made. So I’m just going to unroll that. All this is is just some fresh butter, and I let it come up to room temperature and mix it with some chopped parsley. So cut yourself a piece, stick that on top. And as that melts, all that parsley is going to start to flow down.

How delicious is that? Bring me the gravy.

I’m Curtis Stone, and that’s your GMC Trade Secret.