 One of my favorite things about potatoes is that they always have these little faces in them. It looks like a sloth. Mashed potatoes are one of the perfect foods. They're creamy, they're fluffy, they're delicious, they're comforting, they're everything. They're elementary. I'm Heather and I'm the editorial director of the Spruce Eats. I'm gonna show you the quintessential Spruce Eats mashed potatoes recipe that's gonna become your go-to mashed potatoes for every occasion. I'm also gonna be making two variations on this recipe. A vegan one, it's very clean and simple, and I'm gonna be making an incredibly rich, decadent, amazing, smashed, loaded potato. When we're done, you're gonna know what makes mashed potatoes, mashed potatoes, and you're gonna make every bowl of mashed potatoes your own. If you've never made mashed potatoes before, follow the recipe once. Understand the concepts which are, choose flowery potatoes, cook them enough, season them enough, and when you crush them, crush them gently. That's all you really need to know. Mashed potatoes are really simple, but the kind of potato you choose really is gonna dictate the texture of your mashed potatoes. Last time I checked, you want it to be fluffy. The fluffiest mashed potatoes, you wanna start with a flowery potato, and you can use a Yukon Gold or you can use a Russet. Try to avoid a potato, I like this. Try to avoid new potatoes or the kinds of waxy potatoes, which could be this kind, the tiny fingerlings, and those have a lot more moisture in them, and also the starches are much smaller, so they create a more dense potato. This kind of potato is great for whole potatoes or roasted potatoes. For the most basic mashed potato recipe, I'm gonna use Russets. They are inexpensive, they are sold in five pound bags. I'm gonna peel them. You don't have to peel them. Peeling is a thing that stresses you out. Don't peel your potatoes. Just mash them with the skin on, and if you don't have a peeler, just use a knife. Once you peel your potato, you're gonna see that it has all of these little speckles all over it, just leave them there. Don't worry about them. These peels, I'm gonna save. Don't throw these out. They're delicious. Roasted with oil, salt, pepper, and a little bit of lemon. They're just like potato chips. Please eat them. Delicious. Potatoes are wildly different sizes. If it says quarter your potatoes, the only thing you need to pay attention to is just that all of the pieces of your potato are the same exact size, and the reason is if they're not, they will cook at different rates. So you just have to cut them so that they're the same size. So you cook potatoes in cold water. If you start in boiling water, the outside of the potato will overcook and the inside of the potato will undercook. So you want it to be nice and even. You wanna season the water so that it's really salty. Okay, to me, this tastes like getting ocean water in my mouth. I'm gonna bring this to a boil. I'm gonna put a lid on it just to speed up the process. I put it in here because I'm super sneaky, like a magician. So I'm covering this. We're gonna cook this until the potatoes are cooked through. You don't really want to time it. You really wanna make sure that you're testing it. You have to take a fork or a knife and just pierce the potatoes. And if the potatoes fall off of the fork, that's how you know that they're done. So tender, just falls right off, all the way to the middle. All right, these are ready to strain. So this pot is still a little bit warm. While those are drying out, I'm gonna use the residual heat to melt up some butter. Next, I'm gonna put some milk in. I'm gonna let it melt for a little while. If you're using milk, if you're using cream, if you're even just using potato water, you want the butter and the liquid to be warm because the potatoes will absorb the liquid better. The delicious richness will get in between every single little starch molecule and every single little bit of fiber and it will make a very, very smooth texture. It's important to taste as you go along. Mm, yum. It tastes like butter and milk. I'm gonna do a half teaspoon of kosher salt. If you don't love measuring, take a little time and get used to how much salt a half teaspoon is or how much salt a teaspoon is. This is a half teaspoon. My potatoes are dry, my liquid is warm and I'm going to use this tool, which is my favorite tool for mashing. It's a ricer. This basically just crushes the potato. Better to just start with a little bit and not fight with your ricer. If you don't have a ricer, it's totally fine. Just use a masher. If you don't have a masher, use something that can crush your potatoes without really like mixing them up a lot. Now I'm gonna get a little serious. Worst thing that you can do to a potato when you're mashing it, the meanest thing is to over mash it. Don't overwork it. It might be tempting to put it in your food processor. Don't, because you know what happens? When you smash all of the starches, they literally turn into glue. That's not good mashed potatoes. I'm gonna try it. Mm-mm, no. That's like almost dangerous. If you like mash them too much, if you whisk them too much, all of those things like take the starches and they make all of the molecules like hold on to the other molecules. If you want skins on your mashed potatoes, don't use a ricer. You use a brick, you use a can. What do you prefer to mash your potatoes with? Will you tell me in the comments? So we've gotten this far. The potatoes are gently resting in their warm liquid. All right, and so here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna just not really touch it very much. I'm gonna mix it, the heat's off. Somebody might call this folding. These look done to me. Eating mashed potatoes is a little bit about tasting and it's a lot about just feeling it. It's like sits on your tongue and it's really, really light. And then you just like, I don't even know. Even without gravy, it's so smooth. I'm gonna taste them. What do I say about this? It's like, it's sweet, a tiny bit salty. I can taste the black pepper and it wakes everything up. It's really creamy. It just feels like everything's okay. So I like to plate it in a bowl that contrasts the color, blob it up in the middle, and then I like to smoosh it a little bit to make channels and then put a couple of pats of extra butter on here. Let them melt into the channels. All right, I put a little bit of extra pepper on the top. These are our perfect mashed potatoes. This is one of my favorite variations and I eat it a lot. I'm not vegan, but these potatoes are vegan. They're very light and they go really, really well with lighter flavors. So I will make these if I'm serving them with fish or if I'm serving them with a tracy dish and I want the flavors to play against each other in a way that dairy sometimes like really weighs down. These potatoes are beautifully done. They are Yukon gold potatoes, which are a flowery kind of potato. They have a little bit more liquid, but they're a beautiful golden color. And this is a, I don't know how many potatoes this is. Just wait one second. Okay, so this is eight large Yukon gold potatoes which is about four pounds and I'm gonna drain them. But wait a second, I'm not gonna drain them because a secret that I wanna tell you about the liquid for these mashed potatoes is water. Cooking water is an ingredient that's free. It's actually got vitamins and minerals from the potato. Save it before you drain it. I am going to cut through this vegan butter. There's so many good kinds of vegan butter that taste very, very buttery. It's white because vegan butter doesn't need to be yellow. Really the question is why is not vegan butter yellow? I just don't know, it's not a conspiracy. It's just a question. This recipe has roasted garlic. So I'm smashing these up. I'm gonna use about half of them for vegan mashed potatoes. My guess is that maybe you're gonna want like more of that umami savoriness. I'm gonna pop these in here. I'm gonna add a little bit of liquid because you don't wanna add too much liquid because then it decreases the friction and you get more lumps. This is a masher that I like because I like the angle but really any masher's good. So these are yellowy. They are getting fluffy. I have touched them very little but because they're cooked so nicely really don't need to touch them a lot. They're still a little stiff. They're not like falling off the masher easily and that means for me I wanna add a little bit more liquid. Just a little bit of liquid at a time. I think that I wanna add a little bit of rosemary though just to perk things up. Now I'm adding the pepper. So I'm gonna mix this in gently. The same thing holds true for these potatoes. Don't overwork them. All right, I think this is done. These potatoes are delightful. You know also I really like mashed potatoes with gravy and this would be amazing with a mushroom gravy on top of it. Like a gravy that has like tons of really really powerful mushroom flavor. So if you wanna find out about the recipe for the most delicious and also really simple mushroom gravy to slather on these mashed potatoes watch our It's Elementary Gravy episode. And ready to try it. What does this smell like? Well I can really smell the garlic. It smells like the skin of a potato. Mmm, mmm, mmm. This is so good. It's good because it tastes like a pure, pure potato. The classic recipe tastes like just creamy pillowiness. This tastes like pure potato with just a little bit of earthiness and sweet garlic. The flavor of the rosemary is very, very aromatic. All right, our vegan mashed potatoes are done and now I'm gonna plate them. The secret that I wanna share with you is I actually like these potatoes today even more than the perfect mashed potatoes. One of the things that I like to do when I'm serving is to garnish with some of the ingredients from inside of a dish. So I saved some of my roasted garlic. I'm gonna use a teeny bit of rosemary and there is our delicious creamy golden vegan mashed potatoes. Now we're gonna make loaded smashed potatoes. This is like if mashed potatoes met a loaded baked potato with everything on it and fell in love in a casserole dish. That's what we're gonna eat now. It's different from classic mashed potatoes because it's got everything in it. Mashed potatoes are incredibly quiet and simple, agreeable. This thing is like in your face delicious, creamy. It's cheesy, it's bacon-y. If you put bacon on it, it's got scallions to brighten things up and it is so incredibly satisfying. So I'm using roasted potatoes because they're the easiest to crush. I'm leaving the skins on because I'm expansively lazy. They're really, really tender. These three mashed potato recipes share the same technique. You cook potatoes until they're really tender in cold water that has enough salt in it that it tastes like soup. You drain them and then you heat up a liquid in a pan and then you put the potatoes back into the pan and mash them gently until they're done. That's what makes mashed potatoes, mashed potatoes. And I'm just gonna drain them right now. So I'm gonna use the residual heat here. I'm gonna melt a stick of butter, a block of cream cheese, and some half and half. This basically is the alter ego opposite doppelganger of the vegan mashed potatoes that I just made. This one, where the vegan mashed potatoes are like the most pure, simple, unadulterated potato, these potatoes are just like kind of potatoes but they're mostly other things. All right, so this is kind of mixed together, the butter, the cream, the cream cheese. It's mixed together and now I'm gonna put these drained cooled potatoes back into the pot being really careful not to splash myself. And now we're gonna just gently crush them. These are smashed, not mashed. So I'm gonna just touch each potato once. It's not that precise really. I want these to be lumpy. I wanna feel the potato chunks in my mouth. So this is it, that's it. We're done. I'm gonna loosen this up a little bit because it's a little stiff for me. By stiff I mean it's like, it's hard to get a spoon through. It's like this, it's not like this. You want it to be like that, the second one. Now I'm gonna put this in layers into the pan. I preheated my oven to 350 and I'm gonna put half of these in here. So we're going to layer in some scallions, some sharp cheddar cheese, and then here's some bacon crumbles. Is it mashed potatoes or is it a casserole? You decide. I think that it is just a delicious, really, really substantial side dish. I'm mounting the cheese up in the middle because I wanna see the edges of the potatoes but I'm gonna put the bacon all over. This takes more time to start to finish than the other two because you have to put it in the oven to melt up the cheese. Gonna put some scallions on here, pop it in the oven. It's been 10 minutes and I can smell it in the air. It's cheesy and it's bacon-y and it smells delicious and I'm ready to eat it. Oh, it smells so good. Look at that. Okay, this mashed potatoes dish really is a meal. I don't really need anything else and so I'm just gonna have this in a little bowl, snuggled up on the couch by myself. Oh my gosh. I'm really just besides myself with happiness. I've made this with smoked gouda before and it's really good. I've also made it with kimchi which gives it a little bit of spice and a little bit of that like really fresh, like really fresh onion-y flavor. This is so good. It's really good. I thought I knew them but I didn't. Starting with this perfect mashed potato recipe which I learned the key to perfect mashed potatoes is cooking the potatoes enough, choosing the right potatoes and not really touching them that much. This mashed potatoes recipe is a vegan mashed potatoes recipe and you don't have to be vegan to love it. And finally, last but definitely most is these loaded smashed potatoes, skin on, cheese, cream cheese, scallions, bacon, of course. And they're just really a meal by themselves. All right, mashed potatoes are clouds of deliciousness in your mouth. They're smooth, they're simple, they're rich. They're comforting and they're really simple to make once you know the basics. For more episodes of It's Elementary, subscribe to The Spruce Eats.