My best mashed potatoes yet

Okay, so the other day I accidentally made the best mashed potatoes that I have ever made in my life. And you know how much Reggusia loves all kinds of mash. So that's really saying something. I'm going to show you how to do it. And uh I think going forward, this is probably going to be my go-to like nice mash for, you know, holiday dinners or whatever. There's a couple secrets to it. One involving this. Let's go. Here's about a pound, half a kilo of Yukon Gold potatoes. These are amazing. If you don't have access to them, what I would use instead would be a blend of like baking potatoes or meatly potatoes and waxy potatoes or boiling potatoes. Use like half and half of those. Uh but if you've got the Yukon Gold, all you need is this. # not an ad, but I would totally jump into bed with big potato any day. For this method, you don't need to uh peel them. We're going to actually remove the skins later. You do need to cut them into kind of smaller pieces than you normally would. Sort of a, you know, like a dice that you would use for home fries or something like that. But the shape doesn't really matter. Just uh clank away at them. Again, all that matters is you get relatively small pieces that will uh cook more evenly than large pieces when we put them in the water. There you go. Something like that. Right into the pot of water they go. And I actually like to use like the minimum amount of water necessary. So like just enough water to get everything submerged. The reason for that being I like to use the uh boil water in the place of milk to loosen up the potatoes at the end. And I've just found through like sideby-side experiments that the boil water actually has much stronger flavor in it than milk does. Flavor that really shines through really potatoey in the in the finished mash. And so minimizing the boil water concentrates all of that flavor. And also that's another reason to leave the skins on. The skins have a whole lot of flavor. Now, here's one of the tricks is that um we want to bring this Oh, wrong one. When you want to bring this to a boil, but actually not a boil, like a bare simmer, and you want to hold it at this bare simmer. I need a little hotter than that. You want to hold it at a bare simmer for uh a good long while. I think like at least 20 minutes or so. This is the like molecular gastronomy method of making mash that I've shown you before. That was a lot of M's. Anyway, the the bare simmer, what it does is it causes the individual potato cells to kind of break apart rather than a full boil, which more often will cause the cells to explode, like burst open, and then the starch inside gelatinizes, and we'll make the mash really gluey later when we are trying to uh mix it up smooth. There you go. That's the bare simmer that you're looking for. We'll just leave that there for a little while, about 20 minutes. This step is going to get us mash that is as smooth and creamy as my skin care products from Geology, sponsor of this video. Geology makes dermatologist grade skin care customized for your particular skin needs. Um, as an old man, uh, I guess I need to start worrying about wrinkles, and I certainly need to worry about skin cancer. So, I really appreciate the uh moisturizing morning cream that I use that has some SPF uh, sunscreen in it. I've also got my eye cream for under my eyes and uh, my everyday face wash, which smells so good. M juniper and bergamant. I don't know what bergamant is, but it smells like man. Classy man. At night, I use my night cream. You know, it's got like retinol and hyaluronic acid in it. These are real scientifically proven ingredients. It's not, you know, crunchy nonsense. I also really appreciate my uh body washes because uh in the summer especially, I get really bad uh acne and this has really helped with that. So, why don't you go to Geology's website and take their quiz using my link in the description. You'll get 70% off your personalized skincare trial set and additional 50% off uh any add-ons like the body wash. That's 70% off your trial set with my link in the description. Thank you, Geology. All right, so while I'm waiting, I'm just going to peel and chop a whole bunch of garlic. It does not matter how fine or how evenly you chop it cuz it's not actually going to be present in the final mash. Uh just the flavor. Smash to release the paper. So, uh, the last time I did this like slow simmer method on mash, uh, I got like one of the smartest comments that I have ever gotten on the internet, uh, it was this, you know, guy talking about how he he loved his grandmother's mash or whatever, and he he remembered her boiling it in a, you know, huge pot, lots of potatoes for a big family for the holidays or something in a huge pot over on the stove and it would take forever to boil because it's this gigantic pot on this teeny teeny tiny little burner and, you know, it takes a lot of energy to make water boil. So it would come up to a boil incredibly slowly. Uh and then he remembered that mash being like unusually smooth. And what he said was that he sort of learned from my video uh was that like the likely reason for that is this very phenomenon that slow startup period where the potatoes just kind of simmerred for a little while uh allowed those individual potato cells to break apart rather than burst. And that's what gets you nice smooth mash as opposed to a gluey mash that kind of sets up hard when it starts to cool down. There we go. I mean, that's good enough. Again, it's not going to be in the final mash, just the flavor. All right, it's been a good long while. Let's go ahead and poke these with a fork to see if they are tender yet. And uh Oh, those are actually surprisingly tender. Um, you can at this stage like turn the heat up a little bit and uh boil it a little bit more if they're not soft enough yet. Yes, at this stage we're probably going to burst some of those potato cells open and gelatinize the starch, but I think that's actually kind of a good thing uh to do at least a little bit. If you don't let any of the starches out of their cage, as it were, um you end up like not getting the full taste of the potato. Uh my theory for that is that um or my hypothesis is that uh what happens is when you burst some of the cells uh you get some of those starches breaking down over the course of the heating process and breaking down into simpler sugars that you can actually taste or when they meet your digestive enzymes in your mouth uh they break down into simpler sugars that you can actually taste because like fulls size starch uh you can't taste at all but once it breaks down into some individual sugars you can taste that. And I think that's what's going on here. And in order to get some of that, you actually do need to boil it a little bit and get some of that bursting of cells. All right, let's see. See, you can uh push through it with a fork. Yeah, that's soft enough to mash. We're good to drain. Get something to drain it into. And then uh kill the heat. Grab this. Just go with the pot lid. And I'm just draining the water uh into this receptacle here so that I can uh ah so that I can put some of the water back in in just a minute. There you go. There's that flavorful potato water. Now, unfortunately, I need to dirty another dish just to dump those somewhere uh so that I can finish what I'm doing here in this pot. All right, just a little bit of butter in there for now. And then in goes my garlic just to cook for a second to uh take the edge off as it were. Just get that really sharp flavor out, but I don't want to cook it for long. I like it strong. All right, you go ahead and kill the heat. Then the uh ters can go back in. Then more butter goes in to melt. You can fit so much butter into mashed potatoes. Uh if you have the timmerity for it, like 50% butter, if you want to go up that high. Um what I'm going to do is like probably all of the rest of this butter just cuz you know I'm making nice mash here. Uh and then the other thing I'm going to use is uh creme fresh though uh you know American or East European style sour cream would probably have like the exact same effect. I just don't want to use too much. I use like equal parts creme fresh and butter. Otherwise it's just uh it's too tart, too sour. You could, of course, use just straight butter. You could melt some cheese in here at this point. That'd be rad, too. That'll do me. Big pinch of salt to start with. Probably need some more later. And then, uh, I'm just going to give it like a preliminary mash with this thing. And, uh, this is what I did the other day. And I intended this to be the final step. I was just going to mash with the thingy and I was going to call it done. But, I guess for some reason, I just didn't boil them quite enough the other day. Like, they were just coming out really lumpy, lumpier than I normally even like them. And so, you know, I I tried mashing them some more. I tried getting out the electric hand mixer and like whizzing it up, and it was still just too lumpy. So, I'll show you what I did. A little bit of that potato water in there just to loosen it up to your desired thickness. Potato water. Seriously, give that salt and that is soup. Anyway, so I just could not get this mash any smoother. I thought about putting it into the uh food processor to whiz it around, but the blade tends to break apart those cell walls and uh make the starches spill out and make it gluey. So, I did what they did like in the old French restaurants can use this bowl from before. And it's time to pass that mash through a metal sie. In an old school French place, they would use this like big uh drumshaped sie called a a Tammy and they would uh pass it through. But you can do the same thing with like a normal metal sieve like you have at home for straining stuff. You just grab a stout wooden spoon and you kind of smash it in using a circular motion like that. Like a grinding motion is really what it is. Uh similar to what you would do in a food mill if you had a food mill. I guess a food mill would work for this, but I don't have a food mill. I've never had a food mill. And you're going to think it's not working until it does. It's coming out the bottom. You might have to, you know, scrape it off. Oo, that's hot. And this will break up all the chunks. Uh it'll leave all of the skins and the garlic pieces behind. So you're going to get just silky smooth mash on the other side of the sie. I'm not going to lie, it takes some muscle. It's a bit of a workout, but consider all of the calories we're consuming. And there we are. Silky smooth. And you wouldn't be able to do this if you'd boiled them conventionally. It would come out just like library paste. There you go. There's the chunkies left behind and the skins. Get rid of those. All right. Let me give that a taste. see if I want to make any adjustments. Salt level is actually good. I'm going to loosen it up with a little bit more of the uh potato water. You know, it occurs to me. I I wonder if maybe even in restaurants they're also unintentionally doing that sell break a party trick because they too are boiling huge quantities of potatoes in big pots that probably spend a whole lot of time at a bare simmer before they actually come up to a boil. All righty. My father-in-law made this bowl. He's a naval aviator. He's the scariest guy I've ever met in my whole life. So, like one pound, half a kilo of potatoes gets you what? That's probably four portions as a side dish. A reasonable portion as a side dish. And if it's cold at this stage, it's totally microwavable. It's so silky smooth. Absolutely love that extra step of passing it through the sie. Now, come to think of it, I'm pretty sure I've made a video before where I declared that I had made my favorite mash ever, and now here I am with another favorite mash ever. I'm sure someone is going to call me out on that. But here's the thing. The human experience of time is both linear and unidirectional. Therefore, when I'm in the present, I can't possibly know if I might encounter something that I like even more in the future. Hope this helps.