You're Making Mashed Potatoes All Wrong

Mashed potatoes are a wonderful thing. They're creamy, fluffy, carby and full of wonderful things like butter, cream, sour cream, cheese, scallions, and so much more depending on your preferences.

You probably have a recipe that you use, something passed down from generation to generation. A coveted recipe scribbled on an aging piece of paper that is better than anyone else's recipe for mashed potatoes.

I am here to bring you the news that you have been making your mashed potatoes all wrong — that is, according to Food Network chef Tyler Florence.

I am guessing that when you make your mashed spuds, you start your peeled potatoes off in cold water, cook them, mash them, and then add in your secret ingredients. Doubtless many recipes are variations of this simple sequence of cooking, mashing, and adding in delicious things.

Florence does things differently. He cooks his raw potatoes in the cream that goes into the finished mashed potatoes.

"Potatoes have a really delicate, beautiful minerality to their flavor profile, and when you cook potatoes in water and you pour that water down the drain, you've extracted all the flavor of the potato," he told PopSugar.

"So what I do with mashed potatoes — because you finish them with cream and butter anyway, right? — is I'll take that same cream and butter and add that to the potatoes and cook the potatoes in cream and butter."

And there you have it: an eye-opening way to cook mashed potatoes and preserve as much of their wonderful flavor as possible, simply by cooking them in cream and then straining (while saving) the cream to use once the potatoes are lovely and fluffy and ready to be mixed.