Can You Really Make Mashed Potatoes From Potato Chips?

It's been making the rounds on TikTok for the past couple of years, but for a great many food purists, it's bound to raise eyebrows: mashed potatoes made not with freshly boiled potatoes, but with potato chips, straight out of the bag. Sure, it's easy to find any number of recipes on the social media video platform that use this hack, but plenty of them look, to say the least, unappetizing. So, with such an unorthodox route to your favorite buttery mashed potatoes, perhaps the question is inevitable: Can you use bagged potato chips to make mashed potatoes? The quick answer is yes. Everyone's favorite crunchy, messy, snack food can indeed be used to make mashed potatoes.

Potato chips are, as part of their baking or frying or whatever other cooking process, pretty dehydrated. Adding something like boiling water rehydrates them, but given that they have already been sliced and cooked, you will not have to spend the time prepping and boiling them as you would fresh, whole potatoes when you make traditional mashed recipes. It's not too far from the principle behind instant mashed potatoes.

So yes, it's possible. And given how many of us are on a time crunch these days, none of us will turn down a worthwhile cooking hack, particularly when Thanksgiving rolls around and we find ourselves suddenly on the hook for many other dishes on top of the mashed potatoes. The next question, then, is whether potato chip mashies are actually any good.

The method is fairly straightforward: Boil a large handful of potato chips in some water. The portions should be about three ounces of chips for one cup of water. You then blend the softened chips together with a fork or other utensil to create a mash not unlike what you'll see with any other kind of mashed potatoes. From there, you can add butter, cream, and whatever other seasonings you might want.

A writer at Buzzfeed tried making mashed potatoes with chips using two methods that yielded different textures as well as flavors. First, they used plain chips boiled in water and added cream. Second, they used crinkle-cut sour cream and onion chips boiled in chicken stock, adding both cream and butter. They were admittedly shocked by how much they enjoyed both, but they ultimately preferred the one made by boiling chicken stock with the chips.

"As I had hoped, this version was thicker, creamier, and generally more similar to mashed potatoes in terms of the texture," they wrote. "And as for the flavor, it was disturbingly good. I didn't want to enjoy this, but I couldn't really stop tasting them in the same way that you can't really stop eating an open bag of chips."

What also sticks out about Buzzfeed's method is that it explicitly used a variety of chips other than the fairly typical, ultra-thin-sliced, Lay's-type chips. Deep River, the brand used by Buzzfeed, is known more for its kettle-style potato chips, which are thicker and have a bigger crunch. How this type of chip might impact the flavor or texture of potato chip mashies wasn't mentioned, though the writer seemed to enjoy it.

There is another advantage to using potato chips to make mashed potatoes, particularly if you're in such a rush you can't even think of what seasonings to add. The good news is that your options are limited only by whatever flavors are available at your local grocery store.

Should you want a cheesier flavor, you can opt for Ruffles' Queso or Kettle Brand's New York Cheddar. Just about every brand has a variant of sour cream and onion. Or, if you're looking for something a bit more unusual for mashed potatoes, you could try making potato chip mashies with Lay's Barbecue, Utz's Red Hot, or Hawaiian's Sweet Maui Onion. In other words, while making mashed potatoes with potato chips might seem like a shortcut, it also opens up some possibilities that might not have occurred to us had we been going the traditional route.