 We are making the most famous mashed potatoes in the world by acclaimed French chef, Joel Robuchon. He sadly passed away, I think about a year and a half ago now, and he was actually the most decorated Michelin star chef in existence. I almost had the opportunity to work for him at his restaurant, La Tollier in New York. I think I passed it up for another restaurant opportunity, back when I was still bartending and waiting tables. But there's a reason everyone refers to this guy's mashed potatoes as the best. And interestingly enough, if you were to have these potatoes in France, they already use high quality ingredients. But if an average person in America tried to make his potatoes, it's just not going to work because the potatoes, the butter, the milk, every component of this dish is not so good. And I'm going to add some cheddar cheese for a twist back when I was on Ita. And when I was younger, I remember I went on vacation with my family to Virginia Beach and we ate at the Hard Rock Cafe every night, total tourist trap, and I would get a steak with cheddar mashed potatoes. So I really think that cheddar cheese adds a component to that. So we're going to use Joel Robuchon's technique to make the mashed potatoes, and then we're going to add some cheddar cheese and see how that changes up the recipe. One piece of equipment that you'll see a lot of people use is a ricer. It's basically like a big bowl and it has perforated holes and you kind of twist the potatoes through it. I don't have a ricer, I wasn't going to buy a ricer and I'm envisioning that most people don't have a ricer. So we're going to try to replicate the silky texture of his potatoes by passing it through a sieve. But if you do have a potato ricer, if you want to get that piece of equipment, then by all means, this recipe will be a little easier for you. What's funny is I almost wasn't going to make this recipe because I was looking around Whole Foods, I didn't see the fingerling potatoes and you need them for the very specific texture. And then I saw the price of these. I think it was like $450 or $5 for just a tiny bag of potatoes, which was absolutely insane. But obviously that's a little crazy if you guys have fingerling potatoes that are more affordable or you can try other types of potatoes like russet or red potatoes. I just don't think the texture is going to be as good as with these potatoes. So we have some Finlandia grass-fed butter, Frankie's syringe meat, just some milk I picked up. You can use raw milk from a local farm and we have some cheddar from Frankie's syringe meat. So we're going to bring this filtered water to a boil. In the meantime, I'm going to pop the butter in the freezer to get it really cold and the milk in the fridge to keep it cold as well. And we'll grate the cheddar. You want the cheese to be pretty fine so that when you put it in the hot potatoes it melts really easily. Water just started boiling so I want to measure out one kilogram of these potatoes. So now into the boiling water and these are going to go until they're tender. And you don't want to add too much cheese because it'll overpower the taste of the potatoes. I think that's good for what we have. In the sink, I have my strainer bowl ready. What we're going to have to do is drain off the potatoes, peel them while they're hot, put them back in the pot and then mash them. So the potatoes have been boiling for about 20 minutes and what you want to do is take a sharp knife, stick it into the potato and it should go in fairly easily but not too easily and the potatoes shouldn't break apart. This is the most important step because if you go two minutes longer, you have mushy potatoes that are too wet. If you go too short, you have raw potatoes. So I'll strain out the potatoes here and we'll just use that hot pot to put the potatoes back in after we peel them. These are really hot so I'm going to wear two pairs of gloves and I think a regular peeler is the best for this. Oh, that kind of comes off with your hands too. So there's a video you can watch where they're actually making this. It was, I think, chefs of the Vegas strip and as the guys were peeling the potatoes, they were saying, oh, if you're not burning your hands, you're not doing it right and I am burning my hands. This might not be that bad but I got like 40 of these dumb finger-linked potatoes to peel. This is crazy. So we have our potatoes all peeled. This is where you would have actually pushed them through the ricer into this pot. Since we don't have the ricer, we're going to take our masher and we're going to mash this up on the stove top while these are warming up. So we have our butter and milk out of the freezer and fridge. The recipe calls for 250 grams of butter and this is 227 so a little bit over one of these and between one and one and a half cups of milk. After you rice the potatoes, you're supposed to put them in the pot until steam comes off the bottom of the pot. You don't want to use a food processor because it'll bring out too much of the starch. We have our very cold butter. We want to add this in about five portions. Let it melt. Add some more butter. Some more of the butter. So you just melt about 20% of the butter. Add some more. Keep melting, repeat the process while this is on a medium heat. The main reason you use a potato ricer is so you don't really overwork the potatoes that much and they don't leak a lot of starch and get like gummy. Okay, we have all of our butter melted in and the potatoes kind of look like clay dough. Almost like a dry clay. So now we're gonna add in about a cup of milk. A little bit more milk here. Now if you want a really, really nice texture, we can take this mixture and pass it through a sieve. Now this is a little crazy for the average person because it is time consuming so you can definitely just serve the mashed potatoes like this and they'll be a little chunky. You want to just basically take a spatula and a sieve and pass it through, push it. I would say 10, 15 minutes. But considering you spent 10, 15 minutes peeling the potatoes, I think it's worth the extra step. As you guys can see the bottom, it is coming through. There's a really, really nice smooth puree. So we'll do that and then we'll melt the cheddar in. After about 20 minutes of sieving, we have our perfectly smooth mashed potatoes. And this is how you would serve these. This is classically Joelle Robichon's recipe. Let's taste these and then we'll add some cheddar and see which we like better. I don't think I've ever spent so long making mashed potatoes. Those are really good. Yeah, you could eat this whole pot. The nice thing about Joelle's recipe is that the potato flavor really comes through. The butter isn't overpowering the milk you don't really taste. I'm gonna put a little bit of salt in here. I mean, it's good even without the salt. This is insane. Like the flavor, the texture is perfect. Oh man, there's like no clumps or anything in it at all. All right, let's put this back on the stove and melt some cheese in. Put a little more milk in this, loosen it up. And the reason I didn't put the cheddar in before I strained it was because I figured the cheese would make it thicker and harder to pass through the sieve. So medium heat, the cheese is so small. It melts pretty much instantly. And classically, his potatoes are a bit on the thin side. So to that prior recipe without the cheese, you can probably add another half cup of milk. All right, so there's about $25 worth of ingredients in this one pot, which is kind of insane, but it doesn't taste like $25 mashed potatoes. That cheddar cheese will know the dimension of flavor. I don't really even taste the cheddar that much. So if you just add a little bit of cheese to this, they won't even taste it. And it'll add like complexity to it. If you wanna add probably two to three times the amount of cheese that I added, then you'd have some really like cheesy cheddar mashed potatoes. I don't think there's many side dishes that are more enjoyable than this, especially with the quality ingredients, with the techniques. So thank you guys for joining me today. If you are making mashed potatoes for your Thanksgiving and they're not made with high quality ingredients and this technique, you know, you're really skipping out on an amazing, amazing dish. So if you guys do wanna support me, please just share the video on social media, leave me a comment down below, drop a like on the video. And if you do wanna support me further than that, you can check out frankdestopano.com. We have the Finlandia butter available and hopefully we have some raw dairy products in the near future. Thanks again for joining me guys. Enjoy your Thanksgiving.