The Secret to Perfect Mash

We found the best mashed potato recipe. This is silky, smooth, sweet, and really decadent. And the secret to it isn't actually what you might think. So this is, after lots of research, my favorite way to do mashed potato. I have a slightly conflicted opinion about mash. The best mash I've ever done is Heston Blumenthal's mash. Heston's involves setting the starch in a water bath and vac-packing potatoes, and I know you're not gonna do that at home. So this is the next best recipe I've ever learned, but I think it actually has a better, more superior flavor than the Heston version. The key to it, and I already know what the comments are gonna be saying now, is let me guess what the secret ingredient of mash is. For the fellow chefs, it's gonna be butter. But actually, I don't think it is. I think the secret ingredient to mashed potato is first, the potato. And the more flavor you can get in there from the potato, the better. And I've got a little hack I'm gonna show you that I think basically elevates this to the best mash you can possibly make. And it's really quite simple. So let's move on to the potato. So the potato that I'm delicately pricking all over with my knife is a Yukon Gold. Recently, we did a video about Yukon Gold, and Jack called them American, and lots of enraged Canadians came out against him. Well, I can confirm these are a Canadian potato, a Canadian invention of, to be honest, utter pure deliciousness. So big up, Canada. And it's relatively new. It's a hybrid potato. So it's been sort of developed in the last 60 years. And it was deliberately designed to be the best potato to make mash. It's very, very creamy, sweet. You can use a Desiree potato, a small little Charlotte potato, something that is a rubbish potato for frying. So you're looking for a fairly high water content. You're looking for a high starch content. And you're looking for something that's got a nice amount of natural sugar. So what I've done there is pricked them all over, and then I've just laid it onto some salt. This whole process now is about taking out as much water out of this potato as possible. If you think about the roasting process, what you're gonna do is basically steams inside the skin. That steam escaping is gonna give you a really beautiful, intense mash. So pricking them all over breaks the membrane from the skin, and then cooking them by roasting them basically concentrates the potato flavor. So into a preheated oven, 180 degrees for about 45 minutes. So this is a necessary piece of equipment for our perfect mash. It's called a drum sieve. So it's a very fine mesh here. This is like a really nice, fine one. And also one thing that we use is a ricer. You could just use a drum sieve, but they are prone to breaking if you overuse them. So what I like to do is to break them down in a ricer first, mix it with butter, and then pass it through the drum sieve. If you don't have a drum sieve at home, of course you can use a domestic sieve. Just make sure it's nice and fine. It will work. It will give you actually really good results. But for us, I'll explain when I'm using the drum sieve why it works better, because you can just get a much cleaner press through the sieve, which doesn't develop lots of starch inside the potato. It can make the mash a bit gluey. Okay, so after 45 minutes, you can take out your potatoes, tap off some of the salt. This is going to be the best mash you've ever tasted. Bold statement. It is, to be honest. I was explaining the Heston mash is delicious, but pretty inaccessible for the home cook. Oh yeah, 100%. This adds different layers of flavor. Hey, just be ready, yeah? What about the layers, yeah? Layers of flavor, my friend. You can see that those little holes I've pierced in the bottom of the spuds have done their job. And the salt is visibly more sort of damp and wet on the underside of the potatoes, near those little cuts that we put inside them. So what I'm trying to do is get more moisture out of the potatoes. So whilst they're still warm, I'm just going to cut them open. So this is exactly what we want to see. We want to see them drying out. If you don't have like asbestos chef hands, you can just use a cloth to hold this potato. But basically what I'm going to do, whilst they're still warm, scoop out all that flesh. And this is my one little trick to level it up. We're actually going to save the skins because I always think this when I make mash. I always think, God, there must be a use for these skins. And sometimes I just crisp them up in the fryer or you can make some really delicious crumbs out of them. But in this recipe, what we're actually going to use is not many people realize, but so much flavor from a potato stays inside the skin. Obviously the flesh is really important as well, but the skin is basically like the essence of the flavor of a potato. But I just think it adds an extra level of sweetness and depth to the infusion that we use. Perfect. So our potatoes again, really nicely steaming out there. We're just going to whack this into 180 degree oven for around about 10 minutes. I know a lot of people are going to be saying in the comments about this is nowhere near as good as Joel Rubichon's mash. Joel Rubichon's mash is basically 50-50 butter and potato. This is a lot less. It's still a good amount of butter, it's still healthy. But basically I mix and melt all my butter now. I'm going to save a little bit left just at the end. So that's only about 250, 300 grams of butter. And basically as that melts, what I'm going to do is just pass this potato through my ricer. We're just melting this on the lowest heat possible. Kind of don't want to evaporate any of the milk solids because that's going to give flavor to the mash as well. The reason a ricer is so effective is because the pressure comes from the top all the way down into the bottom. And basically what you don't want to do with mash too much is work the starch inside the potato. I think sometimes we'll all have probably tasted it, but you can get a very gluey mashed potato. And that's kind of what we want to try and avoid here. The sort of art form to making a good mash is it's got to be ultra smooth, which basically you can only get by processing it in a certain way, whilst not really developing the starch inside the potato. Okay, so why I'm doing this now, as you see how gentle I'm being with my Maurice, not working at this stage at all. I'm just combining it with the butter. So that's really important. You kind of see people doing like smashing around their potatoes. Well, basically all you're going to get if you do that is a really sort of gloopy mashed potato. But actually what we want at this stage is just something that's nice and pliable because we're going to start on our infused milk. So that can get laid aside, but just really important with mash is really always want to be working with it whilst it's warm. So I'm just going to cover that with some eco wrap and that will just continue to sort of hold its temperature as we do the next stage. Okay, so the next stage takes our potato skins that's been sort of roasted in the oven. So all of that potato flavor is in those skins. What I'm just going to do is add in milk and cream in equal quantities. And to that, I'm going to heat it up to around about 60 degrees and add in my crispy potato skins. Just roughly chopping them just to increase the surface area. So this is the infused milk that's going to go into our and finish our beautiful potatoes. Bring this up to the boil and then we're going to add into there a little bay leaf. So I'm just going to add in as well a little grating of nutmeg. Potatoes and nutmeg just work so well together. And then we're going to reduce this. So we want this to be nice and thick. Something beautiful happens when you reduce cream, it makes it incredibly sweet. So this is going to add sort of luxuriousness, little bit of like a velvety texture, lots of flavor, lots of potato flavor importantly, but also crucially, it's going to add a lot of sweetness to the final mash. Just make sure that you keep stirring this because the cream can scorch on the bottom, which will result in a bit of an acrid flavor. Okay, so what you really want to start to see with the cream and this has been reducing now for around about 10 minutes, sort of takes like the shape of almost like a custard. So it's slightly thicker. Remember there's starch inside those potato skins as well, which helps thicken it up too. It's incredibly sweet. It's really decadent, but we just want to turn it off now and just allow it to cool down slightly. And then we're going to pass off our milk and then we can use that to finish our mash. Whilst that is cooling down and sort of finishing the infusion, we can just start by passing our potato for our sieve. Now there is a technique to this. What you essentially want to do is push through the drum sieve. If you sort of like scrape it around a lot, you'll work the starch quite considerably inside the potato. So you really want to be careful that you're actually just doing a bit more of a delicate pushing motion through the drum sieve. So the butter as well, adding the butter at that sort of first stage really helps just to loosen it up. So it just, it makes it much more pliable. It makes it much easier to go through at this stage. So just try and restrain yourself from smashing it out and do little by little to get the absolute best results. Important to mention, if I was at home doing this for my kids, I obviously would, to be quite honest, I would skip this entire step. This is to make the best mash in the world, but to be quite honest, this is like what we would do in a restaurant. These have been infusing now for a little bit over five minutes. I'm just going to pass them off and let them strain out. It's almost got a slight golden colour as well, which is going to work really well with those Yukon golds. Bring it back up to the heat. You can already see the consistency of this mash is pretty unreal. And that's literally just the butter and the potato. So I'm going to level it up with a little bit of our cream and milk. Important to mention, not many people realise this, but the potatoes, depending on what time of year you're going to be cooking with them, will have a different water content. So this recipe will change throughout the year. Yukon golds obviously grow for a season, but then they're held for anywhere between eight months in cold storage before you use them. That cold storage completely changes the way the potato is. So I'm not going to give you a perfect quantity on the cream because it kind of has to be done a little bit done to eye. And also it will depend how strong your oven is, how much moisture has been released from the potato whilst in the oven. But basically really low temperature. And you can see that I'm not, you know, I'm not whisking this. I'm delicately folding it because I don't want to overwork the potato starch and create a gluey mess. I'm just incorporating that cream and milk. So we've added that milk and cream there in about four stages. And then I'm just going to go in on this last stage. A few knobs of butter, good pinch of salt. I've not seasoned it basically at any point throughout this process. It's important that you get all the salt off those skins before they go into the infusion. Otherwise that can make the batch a little bit salty. But because of how sweet this mash is, you kind of really need to balance that out with a good amount of salt as well. It's so delicious. And I'm just going to finish it with that final little bit of butter. So as you add this butter at the last minute, this sort of beautiful thing happens where it kind of all, all sort of bonds together. And because of the extra fat that you've added, you can make this really beautiful sort of pliable texture. Almost like rochers, like a, like an ice cream. And this is what we're really looking for. This kind of consistency. Really beautiful. And then, so this would be our finished mash. Okay, so to do our quenelle, what we do is take the mash, just use the side of the pan to form a really beautiful shape on your mash. And then you just use the sort of back of your morice just to give some beautiful little indents. This ultra sort of clean finish. Very simple, very elegant. It's probably the most sort of decadent mashed potato recipe you're going to find on the internet. Choosing the right potato, infusing the milk, the amount of butter, really critical. I think it makes a massive difference to the final product. Okay, we're going to get Rach, our resident Yank, to come and taste this. Hey, chef. You like that introduction? Yeah, that was a great one. Okay, cool. So, the big question is, this is my perfect mash, but we did Joel Rubichon's mash about a month and a half ago, two months ago. Yeah, I remember that. I want you to tell me, honestly, whether or not you think it's better than Joel Rubichon's. Let's see. The texture on this one's really, really nice. It's very silky. I like how it has a lot of different flavor elements, like the potato skin and using nutmeg and bay leaves. I love Joel's, of course, but I feel like it's almost too creamy at points and a bit too decadent. I feel like with this, I could eat a whole plate of and be completely fine, but I really love it. It's perfect texture. Yeah, it's perfect. It tastes so nice. There you go. Unlucky Joel Rubichon. Sorry, buddy. Dethroned. Yeah. There you go. Potato King. In the house.