- The best mashed potatoes use simple ingredients: Yukon Gold potatoes, butter, cream and salt.
- For silky, restaurant-style texture, use a ricer and be sure to drain your potatoes thoroughly.
- To get that authentic restaurant flavor, don’t skimp on butter and salt.
When I misbehaved as a child, my mother would recite Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s short poem, “There Was a Little Girl,” chanting in a singsong voice, “When she was good, she was very good indeed and when she was bad, she was horrid.”
That poem doesn’t just apply to bad behavior—it can also describe food. Take mashed potatoes, for example. Sometimes, they’re perfect: flavorful, silky and just the right level of creaminess. Other times, they’re a starchy, gummy disappointment. The worst part? Those failures often happen in my own kitchen, while restaurants seem to get it right almost every time.
I remember the first time I tried Joël Robuchon’s infamous pommes purée recipe, made irresistible with just three ingredients besides potatoes: butter, cream and salt. The kicker? For every two parts potato, there’s nearly one part butter—no wonder it tasted so good. But it turns out there’s more to it than just butter. Chefs have other tricks to make mashed potatoes truly silky, flavorful and restaurant-worthy.
This year, my husband made a special request for ultra-buttery potatoes—no pressure, right? To step up my at-home chef game, I asked some of my favorite chefs their secrets. Here’s what they told me.
Use Enough Salt
Chef Matt Conroy is one of DC’s top Michelin-starred chefs, known for his work with The Popal Group’s French neo-bistro Lutèce and Mexican concept Pascual. His latest venture, Maison Bar à Vins, has also quickly become a favorite in the nation’s capital.
In the cooler months, Lutèce will often serve pommes purée with homemade duck sausage, duck jus and pickled mustard seeds for lunch. Conroy’s top tip? “With salt, you’ve got to be pretty heavy-handed,” he says. “For every potato, if it’s a baseball-sized potato, you’re probably going to need a teaspoon of salt on each potato.”
Choose the Right Potatoes
All three chefs that I spoke to agree: Yukon Gold potatoes are the way to go. Conroy put it simply: “You need a potato that’s not super starchy. The easiest to get is Yukon Gold.”
This matters if you’re trying to perfect your mashed potatoes. The starches in other popular potatoes, like Russet or Idaho, can create a gummy texture that you want to avoid. Waxier potatoes, such as red potatoes, may well leave you with an arid mouthfeel—even after you’ve added plenty of dairy.
Invest in a Ricer
I also spoke to Chef Mark Timms, an executive chef for Marriott International in North America. He jokes that he’s a Mary Poppins-like figure, “popping in where I’m needed” at the hotel giant’s restaurants.
When it comes to mashed potatoes, he says, “you need to get all the lumps out and make sure it’s nice and smooth, so I love ricing them.” Conroy agrees. “All our potatoes will get boiled and peeled, and then we’ll run them through the ricer or food mill to give you a really nice texture. It’s faster than using a little masher like my mom used to do.”
If you don’t have room for another gadget in your kitchen, don’t worry—there are other options. Chef Michael Werneke, currently at Inland Seafood and former chef of Prohibition Pig, explains that you don’t need fancy equipment to make restaurant-quality mashed potatoes. In fact, he claims that his stepmother’s mashed potatoes beat restaurant versions—and she uses only an electric hand mixer. The key? Avoid overmixing them, which can lead to a gluey texture.
Strain Out the Liquid
Werneke says a common mistake is not draining your potatoes thoroughly after boiling them. “Potatoes are just right when they start to become fork tender but not mushy,” he explains. “Drain them well, using paper towels. As you let them cool a little bit, they’ll dry out even further.”
Conroy has his own method. “One nice little trick that people can do is to strain your potatoes, and then I like to rice them back into the pot that you had cooked them in to keep them warm. But it also will help get that initial steam out of there. There’s less water in your potato, and you can replace that water with the cream and butter. You’ll get a more flavorful potato that way as well,” he explains.
Add Lots of Cream and Butter
Timms says that he’s seen some chefs put in egg yolks to further emulsify their potatoes, but he prefers to stick to the essentials. “It’s just cream, butter, salt and pepper. Have a nice day,” he says. “For me, it’s just by sight. I’m a very visual person, I don’t measure it out.”
“We’re a French restaurant, so we lean pretty heavily into the butter and cream,” admits Conroy of Lutèce. At home, however, he likes to flavor his potatoes with ingredients like thyme, rosemary and a couple smashed garlic cloves added to the cream and melted butter. “Then once I strain my potatoes, I mash it with all that cream and butter [and then] I’ll strain the herbs out. All those herbs really give you that nice little background flavor,” he explains.
To cut back on butter while still achieving maximum flavor and creaminess, Werneke recommends using buttermilk. “Substitute buttermilk for your milk, and you can use a little less butter. The acid in the buttermilk cuts through a lot of the fatty flavors,” he explains.
Keep It Simple
Timms is a stickler for keeping his mashed potatoes simple, emphasizing a uniform, pristine white appearance. “I add white pepper, not black pepper,” he says. “Nobody wants little specks of black in the potato, right?” He also insists there’s no need to top them with chopped chives.
Keeping things simple also opens up more possibilities in the kitchen, says Werneke. He suggests twice-baking mashed potatoes or piping them over shepherd’s pie. “They’re just so versatile. You can do all kinds of things with them,” he explains.
The Bottom Line
The truth is, you’ve probably already messed up mashed potatoes in your kitchen at least once or twice—I know I have. Even restaurant chefs don’t always get it right. But after years of culinary training, it becomes second nature.
As the cold months arrive and gatherings with family and friends become more frequent, it’s time to perfect your recipe. I plan to follow the chefs’ advice of keeping things simple: use Yukon Golds, butter, cream, salt and possibly white pepper. I’ll also make room for a small ricer and be sure to drain my potatoes well—these steps seem to make the biggest difference between home and restaurant-quality mashed potatoes.
