Our site has a lot of recipes for mashed potatoes—a quick search pulls up an impressive 415 results! So how on earth can you choose which one to make? Should you go with hand-mashed russets with cream? Yukon Golds with tons of butter pressed through a potato ricer? After extensive experimentation, we discovered our platonic potato ideal—mashers that are smooth and silky, never heavy and gluey; fluffy as a cloud with a hint of garlic, thyme, and a secret flavor-boosting weapon: tangy sour cream.
We began our quest for the best mashed potatoes ever by cooking some of the top-rated recipes on our site and analyzing what we liked (and didn't like) about each one. Then it was back to the kitchen to create a Frankenrecipe that combined all of our favorite elements. After many rounds of testing, we created this recipe for Our Favorite Mashed Potatoes, which we really (really) love. Here's what we learned:
One potato to rule them all.
First things first: we had to start with the potatoes. Epi has recipes using russets, Yukon Golds, red-skinned spuds, and many other types of potatoes (but we all know it's between the russets and the YuGs, right?). While russets have a pure, baked potato-y flavor and fluffy texture, our blind taste test revealed that four out of five staffers preferred the creamy texture and buttery goodness of Yukon Golds.
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Most recipes will tell you to start your potatoes in cold, salty water, which is great advice! Starting in cold (and cutting them in similar-sized chunks) helps the potatoes to cook more evenly, rather than shocking the exteriors and cooking them to crumbles while leaving the interiors underdone. Simmer them at a moderate pace—hard-boiled potatoes can become waterlogged. And whatever you do, don't skip the step we learned from Light and Silky Mashed Potatoes: Drain the potatoes and return them to the pot and cook, shaking, for 1–2 minutes until all the excess moisture has evaporated. Your resulting spuds will be creamy, not watery. And, just to be extra thorough, we tried baking our potatoes, too, like in Earthy Mashed Potatoes. While you don't have to worry about a diluted potato flavor, cooking potatoes takes longer this way, and it's difficult to quickly remove the skins and mash them while still hot.
Once we established our potato of choice, we moved on to mashing technique. We tasted recipes side by side that had been mashed using a traditional masher (good but a little lumpy; fine for those who prefer a more rustic mash), ricer (smooth as silk), food mill (pretty similar to the ricer), stand mixer with paddle attachment (a decent substitute if you don't have a ricer or food mill and are making a large quantity, but a little gluey for our tastes), and a food processor (NOPE: Gummytown, USA). The moral of the story? The best mashed potatoes aren't mashed at all, instead they are pressed using a potato ricer, which pushes them through a grid of small holes (kind of like a garlic press), breaking them into tiny pieces and keeping them light and fluffy without overworking them. The more potatoes are mashed or mixed, the gluier they become, which is why the spuds puréed in a food processor were such a mess. We don't often recommend unitasker tools, but this is an exception. For the smoothest, most velvety mashed potatoes, invest in a potato ricer.
Another big question: what to add to make the potatoes rich and creamy? We tried recipes with butter and milk of course, but also added heavy cream (super rich and a little too decadent), buttermilk (tangy but a little watery), cream cheese (added a little too much body and heaviness), and even a dairy-free version with olive oil (spoiler alert: mashed potatoes taste better with dairy!). The butter + milk combo was hard to beat, but we felt it needed a little something extra. That's when we took a cue from these Sour Cream Mashed Potatoes and folded in a small amount of sour cream as well. That gave our potatoes the perfect amount of buttery creaminess with just a touch of tang.
Our mashers were almost done—we just wanted to build a little more background flavor. We loved the herb infusion in these Extra Buttery Mashed Spuds and decided to infuse our milk with thyme sprigs. We were also crazy for cooking the potatoes with garlic cloves, then pressing them through the ricer along with the spuds, as in this recipe for Perfect Mashed Potatoes. Raw garlic can be overwhelming, but adding softened, cooked garlic cloves to the ricer with the potatoes breaks them into tiny pieces that permeate the potatoes with subtle garlic flavor.
Mashed potatoes are best eaten right away, but sometimes large gatherings like Thanksgiving make dinner choreography challenging. You can always do the prep ahead: peel and cube the potatoes and store submerged in water in the fridge up to 24 hours in advance. Or, go ahead and make your mash, but reserve 1/2 cup of the milk and butter mixture. Cover and store at room temperature up to two hours, or chill, covered, up to 8 hours. Reheat over medium and gently fold in the reserved liquid.
