Most people usually choose baked potatoes or fries as a side dish for their meat. I also prefer them to mashed potatoes in restaurants. But when I make my meals at home, I usually go to the trouble of making porridge. And if one of my friends comes over for lunch, they may literally crave mashed potatoes. I’m no chef, but in this case I guess I can be proud of myself because at least five people have already asked for my mashed potato recipe. It’s such a simple dish and you just need to know how to cream the potatoes properly.

A common procedure I see at most of my friends’ houses is to peel the potatoes, boil them, mash them and add milk and a little butter. The result is a fairly good tasting mash, but unfortunately it’s nowhere near the one I make. The biggest shock for my friends was the fact that I cook the potatoes with the skin on. This is what makes the result creamier.

The potatoes with the skin make the mash smoother

I boil the potatoes and then peel them. My friends have asked me several times why I make it so complicated and don’t peel them first. I find that laughable, though. I find scraping raw potatoes much more challenging than peeling the skin off cooked potatoes afterwards. So I definitely won’t save myself time or work by doing the opposite. Moreover, potatoes cooked in the skin are much more suitable for mashing.

“Cooking potatoes in the skin gives you creamier mashed potatoes because some of the starch is lost in the water in which the potatoes are cooked when you peel them before cooking,” explains cooking expert Elizabeth Mervosh. She adds that if you cook potatoes without the skin, they soak up more water and the mash is unnecessarily watery and soggy.

Mashed potatoes go well with many dishes. The more delicate it is, the less it disturbs the texture of the dish and is rather its pleasant complement. ━━ Mashed potatoes go well with many dishes. The more delicate it is, the less it disturbs the texture of the dish and is rather its pleasant complement. ( Source: Divya Kothari /  Unsplash+ )

Sour cream and cheese

Mashed potatoes should be an experience. Obviously, it’s not the healthiest dish, as it has quite a lot of butter in it. Foreign chefs recommend adding salted butter, which I only recently discovered. It would seem that adding plain butter and salting the porridge is the same thing, but the taste is really different when you mix in ingredients already combined earlier.

But the real secret to the softest and smoothest porridge is a spoonful of sour cream and a bit of processed cheese, which melts beautifully in the warm porridge. I add these ingredients to the dish and believe me, they transform it beyond recognition. When I told my friends the truth, they first argued that such porridge is not healthy. And I agree that it is a fatty dish that one should not consume daily.

On the other hand, you put a lot of plain butter in porridge, so the dish itself is not something that is recommended to be eaten on a daily basis. So it’ s not such a sin to make the porridge a little better, if you have it rather exceptionally as a reward.